The store brands are often the exact same thing as the premier label products. The manufacturing plant or cannery doesn’t even stop the packaging line. They just drop in the next brand of labels in the packaging machine and away we go.
Not always.
During college I worked at a potato chip factory. They would start out the day packaging the the chips in the private label boxes while they adjusted the temperature of the fryer and speed of the salter, etc. Once those were all working perfectly, they they would start packaging the chips with our own brand.
And if we ran into a bad batch of potatoes – soft & mushy, or too sugary – they often switched over to the private label packages.
Of course, there were times when the stock of the private label was low, so they were filling both the private label boxes and our own label ones with chips off the same fry line. (But even then, our label was used on the first machines in line, while the private label was done on the machines at the end of the line, where they were likely to get more broken chips & crumbs.) So there was a definite effort to make sure that our brand was higher quality than the private label brands we produced.
That and the store will often choose to pay for different formulations from the name brand. A local store’s brand of liquor was always 20% less alcohol than the name brands of the stuff. The packaged meat may have 10% added solution instead of the name brand’s 4% added solution. Certain store brands are high quality because the store chain wants high quality. Other store brands are not very good because they want cheap and it shows.
I’d have to guess that if you guys made generic, the chips were the floor sweepings and half inch pieces. At least that’s what I remember generic food to be like.
In both those cases, that would be clearly visible – the label is required to state the proof of liquor, and packaged meat must state the added water solution.
No, that would put us at too much risk for health code violations. They came off the same basic production line, just usually the ones more likely to be lower quality.
And they weren’t ‘generic’, they were private label. (Actually, we owned that private label name – leftover from a previously purchased company. The main reason we still produced some chips under that name was because smaller stores wanted to offer customers 2 choices of potato chips, but didn’t want to have to deal with 2 suppliers. So they could buy 2 different chips from our salespeople.)
t-bonham that was a comment on the quality of generic not me saying you made generic. Store brand is often good. Generic is always bad.
I know the product has to have the labeling saying what it’s made of. My point was the store brand can be different and you need to look not assume the two are the same.
Not the best cite, but Listerine proudly declares on the back of their label “This formula is not sold to any retailer as a store brand.”
Generally, the store brand is just as good as the brand name, but there are some major exceptions (never had a diet cola that was anywhere as good as Diet Coke or Diet Pepsi).
Often the store brands were not named after the store. A&P had the Ann Page brand back in the 30s, for instance. The idea was to make it seem like a brand name.
Now, a store will often have two tiers: the regular store name brand (with the name of the store) and a second tier “gourmet” line. For instance, Price Chopper has the Price Chopper brand and the “Central Market” brand for more upscale stuff.
Generic brands are rare in the US. There was a fad for them for awhile, but they developed a bad reputation and most stores discontinued them.
Albertson’s around here has multiple tiers of store brand for at least a decade. The lowest end is Good Day (which they’re now re-naming to Shopper’s Value), then there’s the Albertson’s brand which is a little better, then the Essentia brand, which is higher-end than the Albertson’s brand. Often the distinction isn’t actually in quality, but in selection: For instance, in ice cream, the Good Day/Shopper’s Value has perfectly fine chocolate, vanilla, strawberry, Neopolitan, and chocolate chip, but that’s it, while the Albertson’s brand has fancier things like spumoni, rocky road, the Denali flavors, and so on.
Another thing you’ll see in American supermarkets are name brands that fit into the generic/store brand nice. For instance, you’ll be able to find Malt-o-meal cereals in almost any grocery store in the country, but they’re usually the cheapest ones available (cheaper even than the store brands).
In some cases, the store/generic brand is better. For instance, puffy cheetos.
Jewel used to have both store brand and generic. This was in the late 80s, early 90s in the Chicago suburbs. Store brand were in black packaging with the Jewel logo, and the name of the product in white. There was usually a picture of the product on there, too, in a sort of rounded-off diamond thing. They were of similar quality to the name brands–in fact a few, most notably their “Toasted Oats” faux-Cheerios–seemed better.
Then. . .there were the generics. They were in white packaging with an olive green stripe, and had the name of the product printed on it in a really industrial-looking font. “Bleach.” “Plates.” “Cookies.” “Cheese Curls.” “Chips.” And so on and so forth. The food they offered was generally sub-par. . .with the exception of the cheese curls, which were excellent. I think they were going with the military surplus look, there.
I think I’ll search my mom’s house tonight; I remember seeing an ancient box of generic “Bleach” there not too long ago. . .