We sometimes hear (like on CBS news last night) that many store brand generic items are in fact manufactured by the brand name company.
How can you tell?
I know often it’s not the case. For example, Dow chemical makes almost all generic aspirin and none for Bayer.
In other cases, it’s the reverse. Almost all store brand pineapple is made by Dole, who controls most of the crop, although they have different standards for the store brand, depending on what quality the store is willing to pay for.
I found out that Costco jeans are made by Lee. So instead of paying $25-$100 for a pair of Lee jeans, the Costco label only puts me back $12.95 a pair. My ego isn’t fragile that I have to wear brand name labels just to make me feel good.
I’ve asked my local grocery store (Winco) about some of their non-brand items. As a regular shopper who talks to the store employees, many volunteer the details of their products.
I’ve been using the same off-brand razor blades for years. A ten-pack now runs about $3.50. The same blades, under the brand label, run more than $40.00. Go figure.
Years ago I would buy 4C brand powdered iced tea mix in a box with eight or ten individual packets. One week I picked up the store brand and found the packets inside were exactly the same and even had the identical printing as the name brand, and tasted the same.
Also, check the ingredient list. If they’re identical, it’s highly likely they’re made by the same company. Alternatively, if they’re not identical, it means they aren’t.
But do you know if it’s the same material? For instance, suppose Lee buys goods form Acme Textiles. And Acme has “A” material and “B” material and “C” material.
So Lee buys the “A” material and makes Lee Jeans, and buys the “B” material (cheaper of course) and makes Costco Jeans and rejects the “C” material.
So in this case Lee makes Costco Jeans but uses lesser quality, that way they can get the profits without degrading the brand name.
OR
Do they simply slap Costco lables on some of the jeans and use the same materials?
I’ve seen many research studies that indicate the generic OTC (over the counter) drugs and viatmins by major drugs stores like Walgreens, CVS and such are the same quality as name brands. (
In Spain, companies and people get a unique code which identifies us for many purposes; any product made in Spain has a “made by AB1234567890.” If the code matches, then you know it’s a different brand but from the same folks.
Sometimes, even if the packaging is the same and the maker is the same, specs are different, making the two products different.
For food there is usually something on the label that says who it was packaged by. My wife used to work for a company that made hot sauce, which later went out of business. The label lives on, and it is easy to tell who makes it now. You can also ask. We bought a Sears TV made by Sanyo. And I worked one summer at a jewelry wholesaler which supplied Sears - and didn’t tell them we got our jewelry from other sources.
Just because a generic / store brand product is made by a major label (or the same company that makes products sold under a major label) doesn’t mean they are the same product. Often they are, but they are sometimes different. For example, I once had the opportunity to spend some time doing some training for a company that made pet food. I got a tour of the plant and learned that this company made the dog food that went under the house label for a Major Discount Retail Chain. They also made some of the food for national, “brand name” companies. Each product had a unique formula, controlled by computer. X% of corn, X% animal fat, X% animal protein, etc. The colors and shapes would vary according to the brand being produced as well.
So, this was a case of a no-name manufacturing plant producing both “house brand” and “name brand” products, using mostly the same ingredients, but with differing formulations and details.
Not only is the answer “it depends” but the store may not know the answer even if it wants to give it to you.
Contracts for store brand goods are usually bid for with the work going to the lowest qualified bidder. And these contracts may run for short periods of time so that many firms may have the contract over a year. Or else no one supplier can handle all a company’s needs and so several suppliers are necessary.
This is more likely to be true for really generic items like socks or canned fruit than for jeans and televisions, but thousands of store branded items exist. Maybe tens of thousands. You can’t say anything and have it be universally true.
Nava, I know of no equivalent to that company code in the U.S. People would scream “1984” even if they had no idea what that meant.
I Googled around and I guess it depends. Indeed there are some companies like dairies that do indeed use the exact same thing. In other words, the same milk goes into different bottles or that hunks of the same slabs of cheese do go to name brands and house brands.
And others use different formulas or quality products to make brand names vs house brands.
I guess you’d have to know someone who works at the factory to be certain.
I can’t speak for food and clothing, nor for vitamins, but for any OTC/prescription drug regulated by the FDA (in the US, the HPFBI in Canada - each country has their own regulatory agency), the generic drug product will be equivalent to the brand name product in every way that matters.
The drug will contain the same drug, of the same purity and quality, and have passed all required testing exactly the way the brand name drug will have. Clinical trials will show bioequivalence, which means, essentially, that the generic will produce the same medical/biological effect, with the same/statistically similar frequency of side effects, no additional/riskier effects, etc. For medical purposes they are the same.
What can be - and often is - different will be the inactive ingredients. Any combination of FDA approved excipients that cause the drug to have the same release, bio uptake, metabolic etc etc profile as the brand name can be accepted, and the generic will pretty much never be the same colour, or even need to be the same shape as the brand name.
In short, blind clinical studies of generic vs brand name show no difference whatsoever between the two products, and this is the fundamental criteria for generic approval. Some people claim that the generics “don’t work for them”, but on the average population, this isn’t true from a statistical standpoint.
I used to work at a paper mill and the same machines produced name brands, premium brands, store brands and buget brands of photocopier paper, but the formulas for the different papers varied. Anyone assuming that cheap photocopy paper with the same manufacturing location as the premium stuff was the same thing in different packaging would be flat out wrong. One of the specific differences I recall was the quality of the “whiteness” of the paper, as their flagship brand was manufactured to be a brighter white.
From my time working member services for Blue Shield, I recall that generics can have varying outcomes due to the inactive ingredients. Apparently some patients don’t tolerate the compounding agents and it interacts with the medicine. I also recall some patients may have allergies to the inactive ingredients, sometime necessitating the actual name brand.
Whether this is true in real life is beyond me, but since the insurance company would actually pay for brand names over generics in these instances I have to imagine there is some credibility to the statement that they are not exactly the same.
The denim quality is very good. They wear well. They fit. They look decent. Whether the Costco label means an A or B material (or even a C) really makes no difference here. They serve their purpose.
And yes, I’ve compared them to name brand Lee’s and Levi’s. Costco still wins out.
True, but it doesn’t go in one direction. Some people may be allergic to a dye a generic uses, and others might be allergic to a dye the name brand uses. The name brand isn’t better, just different.
Exactly. As with anything, individual results may vary, but statistically, there is no significant difference in the way the population reacts to the drug and how effective the drug is at treating the medical condition it is approved for. That’s the basis for getting a generics approval.
I actually did have a reaction to a name-brand ibuprofen, when two other name brand ibuprofens have never given me trouble. So I stick to the ones I know mostly because I don’t remember which brand it was that gave me trouble, and it was such a horrible feeling that I have no desire to experiment. I do, however, buy generic for pretty much anything else, because odds are, it will be exactly the same.
This may be true for this one specific case. Or it just may be that your experience is not typical of others. Or that you are less sensitive to or caring of the actual differences.
Either way, this says nothing about any other generic or store brand product.
My experience with generic jeans vs. brand-name jeans is that I need to buy two of the former to match the longevity of one pair of the latter. I hate to pay for a name, but it’s the economical (and ecological) thing to do in this case. YMMV.