I have always purchased Kroger’s brands. I belie since Kroger and Proctor & Gamble were both based in Cincinnati, that I was buying the same prodcut.
Any truth to this?
In the book “Tightwad Gazette” the author stated that her husband worked for several years in college at (I think) a Del Monte plant. All week they’d package pickles or beans or whatever, then on Friday afternoon after they’d met their quotas they’d slap a new stack of labels in the hopper and start churning out generic pickles and beans. Same vats, same cans/jars and everything.
She then went on to make a pretty good point: how do we know what “a Cheerio” is supposed to taste like anyway? It’s pretty subjective and hard to say which is “better.” For example, while I like Nabisco Wheat Thins for their crispness, I think the Safeway brand is more flavorful and a bit saltier, which makes me prefer it. I’ll be buying whichever is cheapest for the most part, I don’t have issues with either.
I love store brands (specifically Safeway). The list is too long, but the majority of the time, I prefer the store brand. Some of my favorites are Safeway Diet Cola rather than Diet Coke, and store brand cereals.
I think it is absolutely stupid to waste your money on name brands. In my extensive experience, the store brands are as good, if not better, and always cheaper.
I worked at a potato chip company during college. We produced our own ‘name’ brand, an off-brand name (actually the obsolete brand name of another company we had bought years before), and under occasional contracts, store brand potato chips.
They all came off from the same fryers, thru the same salter, and off the same product line. So they were basically the same.
But we did take some steps to try to keep the quality of our ‘name’ brand a bit higher than the others.
- machines toward the front of the line were filling the ‘name’ brand bags. Those toward the end of the conveyor line (thus more likely to have broken potato chips) would be packaging under the other brand names.
- when starting production in the morning, they started up these machines at the end of the line first, packaging under the other brand names, and started up the machines packaging the ‘name’ brand last. (There are often problems getting everything running right when starting up, and the first chips off the line might not be as high quality as later. So they tend to go into the other brand packages.)
- during certain times of the year, fresh potatoes aren’t available, and you’re using potatoes that have been stored for months. Some years they don’t last as well as others, and you have to be starting with some poor quality potatoes. On days like that, we would tend to load them into the other brand packages, rather than our ‘name’ brand.
Another hint: the best potatoes were used to make the plain, unflavored chips. If the potatoes were of lesser quality, we made more of them into the flavored chips: the ones coated with cheese, onion & garlic, sour cream, etc. – the poorer quality potatoes aren’t as noticable under those flavorings. So if you want the best chips, buy the plain ones and add your own chip dip.
P.S. Similar things apply to most natural food products. But on manufactured items, these are built to specs, and can be of higher or lower quality than the ‘name’ brands.
For example, Sears “Kenmore” appliances are built in the same factories as other brands (mostly GE & Whirlpool). But Sears is big enough in appliances to write their own specs for the machines, and in many cases theirs may be of higher quality than the ones built under the manufacturer’s own brand name on the same assembly line.
I once attended a presentation by a grocery-store manager, where we opened cans of various foods and compared them (green beans, corn, some other stuff). The store brand was frequently higher-quality, because the brand mane could count on their image to sell the product while the store brand had to compete. So the store green beans were smaller and had fewer stems, that sort of thing. A lot of the time (as noted) the products are coming off the same factory line.
With canned pineapple, you may notice that Dole comes from the Phillippines, while the store brand is Hawaiian.
I often like store-brand breakfast cereal better than the original; I find Nutty Nuggets to be better that Grape-Nuts.
Sometimes the quality is worse; I’ve hated some store-brand items (refried beans and cream of mushroom soup come to mind). But you just have to try each thing out individually.
The local Kroger is one of the supermarkets where I regularly shop. I have been told by employees that “Private Selection” is a second house brand for them. And I’ve noticed that in many “spoilable” lines, the PS brand is equal to - and sometimes superior to - name brands. Two examples: packaged presliced luncheon meats (PS is generally leaner, with good taste) and ice cream (PS ice cream flavors are mostly better than name brands, IMO).
I used to work for a company that made the store brands of three or four large competing national chains, as well as several of its own retail brands. Every single type of bottle was filled with the exact same identical product.
I worked for GE Appliances a few years ago. The Sears Kenmore label is supplied by pretty much every major appliance manufacturer. At the time Whirpool was the exclusive washer and dryer supplier, GE and Whirlpool (and maybe Maytag) supplied the dishwashers, I can’t remember about the rest. At GE the Kenmore dishwashers came down the same assembly line as the regular GE dishwashers w/ the exact same parts. Only difference was the label.
Sometimes, the store brands can be even better than the national brands.
The Ralph’s in my neighborhood sells store brand sausages and cold cuts that are far superior to national brands like Hillshire Farms, or even regional brands like Farmer John’s and Johnsonville.
Their italian, polish, brats, and even cajun sausage are all fantastic, and make me proud to serve them at a cookout…
TVs also. When I bought our first color TV 24 years I ago, I asked the Sears guy who really made it, and he told me. (Sanyo, I think.) That sucker lasted for 15 years despite having water spilled into its innards about a year after we got it.
I worked one summer for a jewelry warehouse that sold to Sears for the Sears label. The funny thing was that Sears thought we made the jewelry, though we just distributed. They had to take the son of a Sears VP for the summer also - he never figured out what was going on. 
Sugar is, or at least was, the EXACT same product, just in different bags.
When I was a little boy, we took a field trip to the Imperial Sugar mill in Sugarland, TX.
Toward the end of the tour, we put on paper hats and went into the bagging room. There, arrayed before us, were bagging machines loaded with the familiar Imperial bags. And, many other machines with Kroger, Randall’s, Topco, Holly, HEB, etc… on them.
I figure that they all got the exact same sugar- it would have been more expensive to somehow refine their sugar to different specs, considering it was a continuous flow process.