I don’t really care for the tortilla chips they also offer (El Milagro is just so superior, despite the labor strife) but my Butera (About a dozen locations) makes some great potato chips. I suspect they’re not made in the store but rather a central location for distribution to the stores around Chicagoland.
While generic drugs must have the same active ingredients, not so with food. Look at the ingredients list and some ingredients may be missing or added or be listed in a different order, meaning their proportions differ.
I’ve also found that with some store brands, the weight may be the same but the food density isn’t. More liquid and less peas, for example. Or the vegetables wouldn’t make the size cut for the name brand, which has minimum standards.
I notice this with creamed corn, which I use as a thickener for stew. Some store brands are very watery and have less corn by volume. Also, the kernels are mushy bits versus whole.
I see non-uniform vegetable pieces in vegetable soup. The carrots in Campbells are all uniformly square. In the non-name brand, the pieces are non-uniform rectangles.
Doesn’t affect the taste, but seems odd when you bite into it. It may be meant to be homestyle.
Indeed. I saw a show the other day (I think maybe it was “Modern Marvels”) where they visited the Kroger cheese packaging and distribution center. Essentially this facility would get HUGE blocks of cheese from the corporate dairy (like 600 lb cubes!), and then cut them into appropriate size blocks for whatever machinery they were going to use it for- shredding, slicing, etc… Then they’d package the shredded, sliced, blocked cheese and distribute it to the Kroger stores nationwide.
I had no idea- I had assumed they just contracted with some dairies throughout the country and just had them produce/package under the Kroger label.
That’s what I typically see with canned goods, especially various vegetables.
A while back, my D&D group found a brand of sourdough pretzels that was really great, head and shoulders above most pretzels, and I think they were a store brand. But they stopped making them. 
Back when I ate such things, I found Save-a-Lot’s jumbo all beef hot dogs to be quite good. Nathan’s flavor with a finer texture, basically.
I recognize this is a bit tougher with wine, as there’s no obvious brand name being mimicked… but Aldi has a house riesling that is my favorite riesling. It’s 7 or 8 bucks, and, yes, I like it better than $15-$20 bottles from a proper wine shop.
I very much like Great Value Organic coconut water better than any of the name brands. They actually preserve some of the coconut flavor, without that cooked taste or noticeable pulp. To me, it tastes almost like it contains a bit of coconut desert topping.
However, people who are used to what coconut water tastes like probably prefer the other brands.
There definitely are “special store brand factories”. These are factories who make products for any number of store brands or small-time brands who don’t find it economical to build their own factories.
In addition, even if a store brand manufactures their products in a brand name factory, that doesn’t mean it will be of the same quality. A factory can set their machines to produce at different levels of quality and/or use different quality ingredients, and a store brand - whose selling point it typically price - might not be as keen on jacking up the cost as would a brand name whose selling point is frequently quality.
I would bet that typically the store brand products are of lower quality than the brand names, and for this reason. Of course, there exceptions. Kirkland products in particular are widely thought to be generally of brand-name quality.
I was told this, and bought a bunch of Kirkland vodka to make infusions for holiday gifts in reliance on this info, and found it to be wholly false. My then-boyfriend/now-husband, then-roommate, and I could all easily blindly distinguish between the nasty Kirkland stuff and Skyy (which is cheap but surprisingly good–I could still tell the Skyy from Grey Goose, but my bf and roommate couldn’t.) It gave me a chance to test out the Britta filter trick, though. After seven (!) trips through the filter, the Kirkland vodka was finally as good as Skyy was right out of the bottle, and could not be noticeably improved further. But it still wasn’t as good as Grey Goose.
I thought of another- I prefer Shop Rite’s housebrand (Bowl & Basket) bottled coffee drinks to Starbucks.