Well, personal taste plays a role. The quality that make an ingredient “superior” might make it less bitter, less syrupy-sweet, less watery, less woody, whatever, but some people might like that quality. Therefore, the generic could taste better. I know people who leave out their yogurt so it’s a bit more sour.
Aren’t you also paying for a name brand’s advertising budget? So that if you could somehow quantify the cost of quality in an objective way, the cost of quality, depending on what sorts of ingredients came in, and your taste, the differential could vary from -$1 to $3, and that might be pretty much how they are priced notwithstanding the ad budget. Once you add that, though, the difference becomes $1 to $5.
Making the numbers up, but you get the idea.
It’s probably hard to sort taste and mouthfeel from pocket-hit. I know that there are a few products that genuinely taste better to me in name brand, but so slightly so, that mostly what I taste is the dry, sandy feeling of being ripped off by paying almost twice as much. Philadelphia Cream Cheese comes to mind. I buy it only when I have company.
I do like Walmart’s “Great Value” products. Their frozen dinners are often better than Swanson’s. That’s not saying much, though. I like them, which is all that needs to be said. At least, they are a handy alternative on the days when I say, “The hell with cooking,” and throw one in the oven.
I assume the darker color of the GV chocolate ice cream has at least something to do with the chocolate. It is a delicious, rich chocolate, whereas the Kemps barely had any chocolate flavor. I should try another name brand of the same or similar flavor to see if I can find one that is just as good. But then why waste the money? I already have a carton of ice cream that I won’t be eating.
I’ve never had a bad experience with any of GV or Equate products that I’ve purchased. My husband is finally coming around. He was adamant that the name-brand items were far better. I think he was excited to try the Kemps ice cream so he could say how much better it was than my GV. He had a bowl and was as disappointed as I was.
He rarely comes shopping with me but when he does, I always point out the price differences. He was shocked when we were at Walmart looking for Flonase. Flonase - $17.48, Equate - $9.87. That is a HUGE difference.
Interesting. I like to keep a few frozen dinners on hand for lazy nights and will have to check those out. Despite its reputation as a low-tier department store (which it is) Walmart is pretty well managed at the top, and I’m not surprised that some of their store-brand products are good. They’ve been very successful in Canada, in contrast to Target, which tried to set up shop here a few years ago and then gave up and left with billions in losses because they just didn’t understand the market.
I have to go to Walmart soon because it’s the only store in the area that carries the “Original” variety of Sapporo Ichiban ramen, and they have it in convenient 5-packs. I’ll check out their frozen foods while I’m there.
I don’t know if this practice is nationwide, but the last two Walmarts we’ve patronized, plus our current one, have this service where you can make a shopping list on their app, tell them what time you’d like to pick up your order and they will amass your grocs, bring them out to your car and load them in. And, sadly, they have to refuse tips if offered. Not having to go into the store is the best.
Oh, and it doesn’t cost anything extra for the service.
I’ve mentioned this before in relation to pasta sauce: the Kroger Private Selection offerings are in my opinion superior to most commercial jarred sauces, including considerably more expensive ones.
This is my understanding as well. “Made by the same companies as the major brands” sounds great but doesn’t mean anything because it doesn’t necessarily mean “made with the same ingredients, using the same processes, with the same specifications” as the major brands. And absent some external specification generics or house brands must meet (such as FDA requirements for generic drugs to have the same active ingredient, bioequivalence, efficacy, strength, dosage, etc.), store brands cannot, as a group, be compared to name brands.
I get Kroger seltzers from Mariano’s around here. Twelve can cases and usually around $4, I go through about 3 - 4 a week. The Kroger Cool Ranch Dorito knockoff chips are good but not the nacho or the jalapeno kettle chips.
That’s something I’ve often thought about house-brand foods. For example, there are lots of house-brand corn chips out there, but none manage to be a credible imitation of Fritos. So in that case, it’s not a matter of quality so much as a specific flavor profile that’s hard to imitate. In other things, it’s a broader profile, like yellow mustard, so unless you’re aiming for say, the specific Heinz mustard flavor, Great Value is just as good.
On other things @PastTense has it nailed- it’s about consistency from can to can and batch to batch. Hunt’s tomato sauce is likely very consistent in sugar and acid levels, as well as viscosity relative to the house-brand stuff, because their manufacturing requirements are tighter.
That said, my own personal experience mirrors @Dallas_Jones’. As a kid, we took the short drive (~10 miles) over to Sugarland and toured the Imperial Sugar factory (it has since closed). When we got to the packaging line, there was pretty much every grocery store I knew of represented, as well as a few I didn’t, as well as the Imperial branding. There wasn’t much distinction- if there was one, it probably had to do with how finely it was sieved for each type, with Imperial being the most uniform. But it was all the exact same sugar- there wasn’t any allowance in the production process for different batches for different customers, etc… It was a continuous process- they’d dump raw sugar in one end, and out the other would come refined sugar, molasses, and their other products (that’s where I learned brown sugar is just molasses-coated white sugar).
I used to work in accounting at a poultry processing plant over 35 years ago in western Virginia. Live birds came in and trays of “dressed” chicken went out with their own brand, IGA (for a distributor to independent supermarkets), and the store brand of a big chain (“White Gem” for Giant Food in the DC/Baltimore area).
The chickens were different sizes and the trim standards were different. Some had more fat trimmed off than others, some had the little spur thing on the wings cut off an others didn’t, little things like that. In those days Giant was a high-end market compared with their main competitors (Shoppers Food, Basics and Food Lion). So the Giant store brand chicken was actually a higher quality than the Rockingham Farms or IGA branded ones.
I see the company is still around, but that particular plant appears to be gone.
Yea, familiar Fritos are often cited as that having that secret sauce that gets introduced during manufacturing and makes them uniquely great. Corn, oil & salt only go together so many ways but FL gets those right every time. That said, the Kroger ones are almost as good and half the price or less at $2-3 per bag.
I have two examples. Kroger’s frozen Italian meatballs are really good. I first got them because I figured a frozen meatball is a frozen meatball. Then I got a coupon for a make brand normally twice the price and they were terrible.
Walmart’s Great Value makes “fudge covered peanut butter filled cookies.” There is not a comparable name brand cookie on the shelves. The FCPBFC may not be quite as good as a Tagalong, but they’re pretty close, available year-round, and at a quarter the price.
When I worked in a regional meat packing plant back in the last century, we made a number of store brand products. Mostly we just slapped a store label in place of our branding but we did do special runs for some products, like bacon in odd size packages. We sold some regionaly popular lunch meats at the time with plenty of seasoning and texture but were looking to expand our territory. We were advised that, in order to appeal to a larger market, we would need to reduce the spices and use a finer grind for the mix. The result was just a generic sandwich filler with almost no taste but was considered comparable to a national brand. A matter of taste I guess, but I much preffered the original. I am thinking that at least some store brands are less generic, regional versions that might not appeal to everyone. I almost always try out the store options when I can and have found some gems over the years.
Generally speaking, store-brand OTC drugs in the U.S. are going to be fundamentally identical to the name brands on performance: they are regulated by the FDA, and have to conform to providing the correct active ingredients at the labeled level. So, I always buy the store brand, unless I have no choice.
