Is there a difference between a gallon of $3.50 whole milk and the $1.99 gallon store brand next to it? I always get the cheaper, but I always wonder why people pay more. Better cattle, better feed, better taste?
Some folks are more brand consience than others, you can see that on almost every aisle of any grocery store. I do find that there is a difference in quality in some lower priced brands though. I find the store brand at Top Foods, a small chain in the Seattle area, to be horrid tasting stuff but the cheaper brands of milk at Safeway and Albertsons taste okay. Plus the more expensive milk tends to have a consistant quality year around. When the weather is nice, cows eat more grass and other natural items. During the winter cows eat alot more grains and bundled feeds such as hay and alfalfa. I can taste the difference in the milk, it always tastes better in the winter than summer. The better brands can adjust for this difference, the cheaper brands don’t.
Some brands are “organic” which means their farms have to follow strict feeding and other rules. Some brands don’t allow their farms to use BST (hormones). It might also be the supermarket taking a loss on a particular brand so that it can advertise a low price and bring in more customers for the other stuff, known as a ‘loss leader’.
That being said I was just reading a bit in one of the market magazines about a bottler in Mass. that was undercutting most of the established brands by quite a bit.
greenteeth – that which is a more interesting question is what store do you shop at that has more than one brand of milk? Every grocery store that I’ve ever bought milk at has only ever sold a single brand of milk! I’m not counting shelf-stable, UHT, consensed, etc., but the cold milk in the milk section.
I’ve gotten milk in Texas, Georgia, Illinois, and Michigan, in big places like Kroger, Meijer, Jewel-Osco, Farmer Jack, Piggly Wiggly, Albertsons, IGA’s, Spartans, and so on, and have never seen any place that has but a single brand.
Heck, Balthisar, my local Jewel-Osco has at least three brands of whole milk that I can think of off the top of my head. Jewel Brand, Dean (I think it’s Dean. I know it starts with a D.), and Oberweiss.
Well, I live in the Dallas area. Shop at Walmart, Kroger, Albertsons, Winn-Dixie (well… until they left the state a few months back), Tom Thumb, Minyards, Super Target (Yes, I go many places) Usually, most places have three brands of Milk (Borden typically ($3.50), then some slightly cheaper brand (2.99) like Oak Farms or Schwepps, then a real cheap brand (.99 to 1.99) like Poinsetta. Lived a few different areas of the country and they usually have a few choices as well. Maybe you just never really noticed before. Take a close look next time and see if there are any other offerings.
I know of several Krogers around here (greater atlanta) that have 2 and 3 different brands of milk. The price difference is not as great as $2 to $3.50 – excluding sales, all are within 50-75¢ of each other.
I’ve never seen a price difference as large as 50 cents, let alone a buck and a half. That’s a HUGE difference. Buy the cheap stuff. They all have to meet the same Federal food standards.
I’ve seen something along these lines.
‘Regular’ half and half for $1.99 and gormet half and half for $2.99
If they were out of regular I sometimes buy the gourmet, but w/o a side by side compairson I can’t tell any difference except I feel a little lighter in my right front pocket when I get the gormet type.
The brand difference isn’t obvious–it’s all in white one gallon plastic jugs, and the caps are all the same color–around here that’s red for whole milk, blue for 2%, etc. It didn’t occur to me for a long time that there were different brands, but if you look closely, I bet you’ll see that there are. The most “popular” brand will be at eye level in the case, and if you look down to the very bottom shelf you’ll find the less expensive brands. You have to read the labels, and the tags on the shelves, to see that they’re different, though.
Around here, unless you factor in the organic brands, the difference varies, but can be as much as thirty or forty cents. That I’ve noticed, anyway. Organic stuff can be much more expensive.
:eek:
Milk is wholesaling for about $10/cwt right now. At 8.6 pounds to the gallon that’s 86 cents.
Well, in this area(Memphis, TN) we have Krogers, Schnucks (the Schnucks stores here used to be a local chain called Seesel’s which was bought by Albertson’s, then sold to Schnucks), and (of course) Piggly Wiggly’s, Super Wal-Marts, and Super K-Marts, along with some smaller stores.
Unless the grocery store is large enough to have it’s own creamery (Kroger’s and Schnucks), it has to purchase it’s dairy products from a local dairy company called Turner Dairy. They can also purchase Forest Hill products, but that’s just an upscale lable for Turner Dairy.
Turner is, for the most part, the ONLY choice you have for dairy products unless, as I said, the store is large enough to have it’s own dairy. Because of this, Turner can charge a local monopoly price for it’s product and get it. In the national stores (Kroger and Schnuck’s), they have their own product and can sell it cheaper than they purchase it from Turners. However, as noted above, some people are brand-conscious and won’t buy anything BUT Turner’s, since it’s all they grew up on, so the large stores have to carry Turner to satisfy a good number of companies.
This results in the whole milk in the Turner/Forest Hill section of the Kroger’s dairy case running about $2.99 for 1/2 gallon, while the Kroger brand is only 1.99 or less (I've seen it for .99/ 1/2 gallon on sale - $2.00 less than the Turner brand), because they don’t have to pay the middleman.
I personally have never tasted a difference between the two brands.
critter42
WOW! I’m going to really have to make an effort to see this next time!
Maybe there are just a bunch of dairies in N. Texas. I know that there about a dozen different brands I could find within a five mile radius of my house. Like I said the most expensive is usually Bordens (which I understand to be a fairly nationally brand, Elsie the Cow, their mascot, is Elmer’s (the glue cow) wife. No lie!
It isn’t unusual to see a gallon of milk for .99 when a good sale is going on, but the average is about $2.50