Equate is Wal-Mart’s store brand. They will contract with many producers of nationally branded products to produce their store brand also. This is a common practice with large retail outlets, Target (Up & Up); Walgreens; CVS; Kroger; etc. Their is competition for store branded products among various manufacturers. The reason producers will manufacturer store brands for customers even though it will compete against their own nationally branded products is that they can marginally increase production of these products on their equipment, so more fixed costs are absorbed, and they don’t have to spend advertising $$$ for these sales. So in many cases, the profit margin is higher for them on producing store branded products than their own nationally branded products.
Finally an answer to my question. The product is actually made by Listerine but under a store brand name. Thank you.
Where did you find that out?
The store brands are not necessicarily made by the same company who makes the national brand. It happens, but there are many other companies who make private label/store brand products that are meant to be a national brand equivalent.
But do they have exactly the same formulation? This is not equivalency, but the same. Wouldn’t it be a violation of patent rights?
You don’t see generic drugs until after the patent runs out. Patents last for 20 years from filing unless Listerine is tinkering with things it is definitely out of patent. Even if they are tinkering the changes would have to be some how inventive.
I wonder if there’s less “playing both sides” these days in manufacturing. There was a time when the mantra was always “Oh, the same plant makes both, they just put on different labels” but now a lot of name brand medicine has a note on the package saying something like “XYZ-Asprin is not sold under any generic label”.
Sometimes the packaging makes a more expensive product easier to use or dispense. I’ve purchased name brands because the generic was clam shelled also.
There are also a lot of weasel claims like “XYX Corp. does not manufacture store brands,” while not being the manufacturer of their own brand. One example I recall was “Cold-EEZE” claiming that they didn’t manufacture generics… which was technically true, since they merely distributed their products, manufactured by an outside source. Of course, the generic was made by the same manufacturer and distributed by Cold-EEZE. It was really obvious for me as a stocker; the brand and generic would be replenished simultaneously, came in the exact same unique shipping cases, and every time packaging styles changed for one (box flaps reversed to avoid being torn open by shelf pushers/dividers, switching to narrower, taller boxes) it changed for the other. The UPC codes of each even had the same vendor code embedded.
A sharp eye for product packaging can often yield a lot of info; are the bottles shaped exactly the same? Is the push-down-and-turn cap designed the same, with the same font on top, etc? I was able to deduce that Church & Dwight manufactured our Equate/Spring Valley gummy dietary supplements simply by that (confirmed later by researching).
A lot of big companies dabble in generics against competitors, too. Valeant, owner of Bausch and Lomb, loves making generics for Alcon/Novartis eye care products, and Bayer makes generics for J&J, Novartis, etc. pain relief brands.
As for the whole Equate/Listerine thing, if I remember to do so when I return to work Sunday night, I can try to look up who the distributor is. I’d wager it’s not Johnson & Johnson, the owners of Listerine, as packaging is different, shipping cases are different.