Do they have food scientists just guessing and checking with taste testers? Or do they know the exact recipe somehow and just tweak it to avoid lawsuits? Or do big box stores require name brands to hand over their recipes as part of a contract to shelf their brand along with their own store brand? Do the name brands try to keep it a secret but they keep getting bested? I have no idea how this works.
In: 45
In basically almost all major branches you have only a few suppliers for certain things.
A former professor of mine worked in a major food production company and basically how it works is that most store brands just buy the product from the brand name and slap their own label on it. In some cases it is the same product, in other’s you have products that didn’t make the quality cut of major brand and are then sold under the market brand. In addition they might be able to increase capacity and use those extra capabilities to create the same product with lower quality ingredients( think like top 20% instead of top 1%).
The profit margins are literally in the hundreds or 1000’s of percent, which means they can also just sell the same recipe for less, as a middle price, low price and higher priced brand product.
This also works in other industries. Take cars for example. Audi, VW, Porsche, Lamborghini all use the same alternator and just slightly different screwing mechanism or in same cases just a different label. The same is true for wheel rims. There is a few big manufacturers who supply all of the major brands.
Even engine’s are equal in a lot of cars as most car brands belong to one major company and just get electronically limited.
VW Group(Porsche, Audi, Bentley,Scout, Seat,Skoda,Jetta,Cupra, Ducati,Lamborghini, VW,etc) ;
Mercedes Group( Mercedes, AMG, Smart, Maybach) ;
Stellantis Group ( Opel,Fiat,Dodge, Citroën,Abarth, Alfa Romeo,DS,Lancia, Maserati,Ram, Peugeot,Vauxhall, Jeep, etc)
Cereal Manufacturers would make store versions of their rivals products. So Weetabix will make stores own brand Cornflakes and Kellogs will make store brand weetabix.
Jordans cereal bars are put into many different packaging. The exact same product in M&S, Aldi, Sainsbury’s packaging.
The same factory can produce for several brands (including name brands and store brands), so in this case it’s very easy to copy a recipe. The store brand might use slightly different ingredients (for example in the factory where I work, we have different variations of the same recipe, and the only thing that changes is the origin of the ingredients. So a more expensive brand will ask for local ingredients, while a cheaper brand will be okay with ingredients coming from another country)
In basically almost all major branches you have only a few suppliers for certain things.
A former professor of mine worked in a major food production company and basically how it works is that most store brands just buy the product from the brand name and slap their own label on it. In some cases it is the same product, in other’s you have products that didn’t make the quality cut of major brand and are then sold under the market brand. In addition they might be able to increase capacity and use those extra capabilities to create the same product with lower quality ingredients( think like top 20% instead of top 1%).
The profit margins are literally in the hundreds or 1000’s of percent, which means they can also just sell the same recipe for less, as a middle price, low price and higher priced brand product.
This also works in other industries. Take cars for example. Audi, VW, Porsche, Lamborghini all use the same alternator and just slightly different screwing mechanism or in same cases just a different label. The same is true for wheel rims. There is a few big manufacturers who supply all of the major brands.
Even engine’s are equal in a lot of cars as most car brands belong to one major company and just get electronically limited.
VW Group(Porsche, Audi, Bentley,Scout, Seat,Skoda,Jetta,Cupra, Ducati,Lamborghini, VW,etc) ;
Mercedes Group( Mercedes, AMG, Smart, Maybach) ;
Stellantis Group ( Opel,Fiat,Dodge, Citroën,Abarth, Alfa Romeo,DS,Lancia, Maserati,Ram, Peugeot,Vauxhall, Jeep, etc)
Frequently they’re manufactured by the same company.
I can speak from first hand experience that at some consumer chemical packaging factories they’ll just stop the line, swap the kind of bottles they’re filling, and then start back up.
So you get store brand being identical or nearly identical to name brand because they’re both *made* by the name brand.
Oftentimes it’s because national chains (Walmart, Kroger, IGA, etc) enter into agreements with, for example, Post or Kellogg’s to produce a “Great value” box of cornflakes. Kellogg’s makes the product, puts it in a generic box, and is guaranteed a sale of say 50k units – they spend nothing to advertise this product, so it’s 100% profit for them in that aspect. The retailer signs a NDA saying they won’t tell anyone that their brand is actually the exact same product as “Kellogg’s cornflakes” just in a plain box without any money spent on the backend to market it.
This isn’t always true, some products are made by specialty companies who *only* make generic products – soda is a prime example, and pet food used to be (though that mfg has since been acquired by Mars Inc).
Frequently they’re manufactured by the same company.
I can speak from first hand experience that at some consumer chemical packaging factories they’ll just stop the line, swap the kind of bottles they’re filling, and then start back up.
So you get store brand being identical or nearly identical to name brand because they’re both *made* by the name brand.
Oftentimes it’s because national chains (Walmart, Kroger, IGA, etc) enter into agreements with, for example, Post or Kellogg’s to produce a “Great value” box of cornflakes. Kellogg’s makes the product, puts it in a generic box, and is guaranteed a sale of say 50k units – they spend nothing to advertise this product, so it’s 100% profit for them in that aspect. The retailer signs a NDA saying they won’t tell anyone that their brand is actually the exact same product as “Kellogg’s cornflakes” just in a plain box without any money spent on the backend to market it.
This isn’t always true, some products are made by specialty companies who *only* make generic products – soda is a prime example, and pet food used to be (though that mfg has since been acquired by Mars Inc).
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