Straight Dope on 'Store Brand' products

Factual Questions
1

So, here’s the deal. I was eating some canned green beens for lunch, and happened across a stem. That got me to thinking… I don’t recall ever coming across a stem, or a chunk of cob, in the case canned corn, with ‘name brand’ products.

Are the canned store-brand products the same as the name brand, but with a different label slapped on there? Or are they a lower quality product? i.e. once the choice green beens are canned for Del Monte, let’s put the remainder in the Kroger labelled cans?

I predicit, like most answers in this world is: “It Depends” or it’s favorite cousin: “Sometimes Yes, and Sometimes No”.

Thanks,
E3

2

My understanding is that you can pretty much count on this being the case, though there likely are exceptions here and there. The recent dog-food scare has revealed a lot of this publicly (not that it was ever a secret), as house-brand dog food was prepared and bagged at the self-same facilities as name-brand dog food.

3

You’re close, but the answer actually is “Maybe it is, maybe it isn’t”.

4

We went to a pretzel factory once and were putting the same pretzels in a name brand bag and a discount bag. I have a friend that worked where they boxed a brand name cosmetic and she said they did the same thing.

Certain things I do see a difference. I think brand name frozen broccoli for example is better than the store brand. Laundry detergent too. Consumer Report gave the best scores for Tide and a Costo brand. I imagine if you get Consumer Report they’d tell you about different items. I recently read about chips or dip, forget which and there did seem to be a difference in taste with the lower priced item.

5

I worked at a dairy plant one summer, and we packed cottage cheese out of the same big vat into containers with half a dozen different brand names on them.

6

There also are some manufacturers that only make store brand products. The best example is Ralston Purina, who made the Chex brand cereals. About a decade ago, they sold the Chex brand to General Mills in order to concentrate on making their store brands.

So store brand Chex are made by the original manufacturer, while the trademark is by someone else.

7

I have never found a store brand Cheerios that replicates that original Cheerios magic.

8

There is a subtle difference, in quality. For instance house brands for vegatables tend not to be as tender. You can’t really tell till you try and eat them with a toothache

:slight_smile:

9

You got this so completely correct that it’s almost pointless to go on.

However, I’m procrastinating from doing real work.

Store brand items tend to fall into two very broad categories: those that are essentially identical to branded products but are cheaper because the costs of advertising and promotion don’t come into play; and those that are somewhat inferior versions of branded products and so are cheaper because they use less expressive components or workmanship.

As just seen with the dog food recall, some companies make the basic product for dozens of different firms, some branded and some not. This not only allows for enormous economies of scale but allows them to separate out the raw ingredients into tiers, with the finest going to the highest priced brands and and just over-the-line acceptable going to no-namers.

It’s the same principle as at the retail end, in which most categories of goods have a three-tier pricing structure of good, better, and best. Some people will opt for good, for any number of reasons, including inability to pay, not needing a better product, or being unable to distinguish among them. Some people opt for best because they can recognize quality, or are snobs, or just don’t care about price, or are unable to distinguish quality and are willing to pay for someone else to do so. Most people wind up in the middle. Stores know this. It’s powerful psychologically and economically, and stores that used to have just two grades of goods are now opting for the three.

Even so, quality is still an issue. I don’t know if you remember the fad for generic label foods from, I think, the 80s. You’d find cans of “beans” or “Cleaner” or whatever. (Several movies - Repo Man, IIRC - made fun of generics.) These competed on price alone, obviously, so there was quickly a run for the bottom to get the cheapest product on the shelves, which naturally destroyed quality, which led to them completely disappearing.

But it’s a waste to destroy perfectly edible food that is not perfect. Poorer apples go into sauce or cider or jelly rather than onto shelves. Beans are still good even if you have to pick around a stem. It’s an individual decision how to balance out price and quality for an individual product. We all do it every time we purchase anything, almost without thinking. There are cues in the marketing that guide these decisions. You can progress up the burger scale from McDonald’s to Red Robin to the Old Homestead Steakhouse and its $41 Kobe beef burger. You can go from Wal-Mart brand beans to Green Giant beans to Chef Fussy’s Gourmet Beans in truffle sauce. In each case it will be obvious to anyone who lives in the U.S. as an adult that the price and presumably quality will be different before a single bite is taken. (Sometimes, though, Kroger’s beans will be just like Green Giant’s beans, and there is no way to know until you do a side by side comparison. Kroger and Green Giant both know that there is a consumer who will make the pick in one direction and another in the other and so both make their identical product available.)

Is that enough “it depends?” Really, I have a lot of work not to get to. :slight_smile:

10

I’ve nothing to add, but I needed an excuse to brag about something -

My youngest son has noticed that the Kroger brand of Fruit Loop equivalents taste better than Kellogg’s Fruit Loops. For some time now I’ve been buying the store brand cereal for myself (I just munch on a handful occasionally) and the name brand for their breakfast. We ran out of the name brand and 3/4 of the way through my box he begged me to go to the store and get more! A victory for cheapskate fathers everywhere. It can be done gentleman, it can be done.

Store brand OTC meds are about all I’ll buy, too. How many different ways are there to make acetaminophen?

11

I think Wal-Mart puts out a very good store brand, especially the Sam’s Choice lines. And I’ve never found an Equate product that I thought was inferior to its twin.

12

I thought about these recently and wondered whatever happened to them–very generic black-and-white labels with just the barest of information about the morsels contained therein.

13

Q-tips. No other brand matches Q-tips. Including Equate.

14

The CostCo Kirkland line is, IMO, the equal of the brand names they sell.

15

Just don’t buy store brand Oreos… ugh. Those are not the same cookie.

16

There was a previous thread where I posted some information with a link to the “Kroger’s” company’s store brand policies. Incidentally, Kroger is the #9 food packager in the US.
They actually have three different “house brand” quality tiers.
There’s a top-shelf house brand that frequently beats the premium brand-name.
There’s a mid-grade product, and finally there’s a brand that usually matches the cheapie brand name for quality.
They don’t all 3 levels of store brands for all or even most of the products they sell, but this kind of stuff FASCINATES me.

Beware off-brand oils that don’t meet current API SL/SM oil quality ratings, but the Supertech 5W30 at Wal-Mart with the API SM rating is a decent quality product, made at various times by ExxonMobil, Shell and others.
Their synthetic 5W30 product was found to be using the Lubrizol company’s Calcium-based high-anti-wear, normal-oil-change-interval type additive pack, which marks the oil as a quality product as well.

17

If you go to Sally Beauty Supply, they have a line of Generic hair styling products. They have hairspray, mousse, gloss drops, gel, etc etc. All the containers are white with plain black lettering. They’re called Generic right on the bottle (though it tells what name brand product it’s similar to*). Those are the only things I’ve seen that keep that generic label style, though.

  • Their shine serum says “compare to Paul Mitchell’s gloss drops” (I think that’s the name; I know it’s Paul Mitchell)
18

If I didn’t make it clear earlier, the mere fact of having three tiers of price/quality drives people to the middle tier, where the real money is made.

19

Stay away from generic toilet paper!
(Details withheld)

20

Not equal, identical. Just try to convince my ex-wife of that though.