I took a fun cooking class in college that was targeted at home cooking.
We did double blind taste tests on nearly every type of food we could think of. It's still amazing to me how infrequently the brand name won in terms of flavor.
Take that as you will, sample size was only about 25 students and my memory might be flawed. But I'll never buy brand name chocolate chips again in my life, I remember that much.
There are slews of items that have laws governing them. Milk is milk. Butter has to follow a formula. Flour is flour, rice is rice.
Butter might feed their cows differently, though, and flours have different gluten contents. Rice can be different varieties. In all of these, however, there isn't much different.
Other things are preferences. For example, my father preferred any-brand-but-Kellogg's corn flakes, but my spouse is in the only-Kellogg's-will-do camp. There isn't much difference between brands after that: Kelloggs flakes tend to be thicker and it changes the taste.
There are slews of store brands that are much better in taste - and ingredients - than their name-brand counterparts. The store brands aren't spending lots of money advertising, after all, and can invest that money into making products that are yummy. Having good-quality store-brand products gets people into your stores.
I’ve heard it’s kinda the opposite. Apparently, lotsa white labeled goods are manufactured in the same plant as the name brand stuff, by that brand, but to differentiate it, the brand will tweak the recipe slightly for the white label run.
I suspect (but never confirmed) that they have some "quality binning" at the factory; the runs closer to set quality get the "main brand" label, the slightly worse get the "value brand" label, etc.
That the cheap store brand is made by the same company that makes the expensive brands is true, one only has to check the manufacturer data on the label.
Fwiw I did strawberry packing at a farm when I was a teen in the UK. This was the exact thing, M&S got the top "quality" selection, then the other supermarkets took the rest.
Only thing though was that the selection was purely visual, M&S wouldn't take any "uglies" (we were told that if we let any in the whole batch would be rejected).
The expensive strawberries were the same ones from the same fields, same picking and packing just put in different boxes with different labels, and they conformed more closely to an idealised strawberry shape.
Quality binning is a thing, but not quite like that.
If they do a factory run for "Brand A", adding the label is a component of that run. There's three main outcomes:
- The product passes Quality Assurance / Quality Control, and sold to mainstream retailers
- The product fails QA/QC, but for cosmetic reasons only such as marring on the packaging or label misalignment. These get sold to discount retailers such as Big Lots[1], but still under the main brand.
- The product fails QA/QC due to a reason that makes it ineligible for public sale. Depending on the margins of the product, it may or may not be worth some level of re-work to make it eligible for sale within one of the two bins above. Otherwise, it's either donated (if the product is safe but ineligible for sale due to some regulatory reason such as consumer protection laws around the word "New" on labels) or scrapped (and might be sellable for some industrial use) or destroyed.
But in all cases, it's still "Brand A" and not sold as a completely different inferior brand.
Private label runs are different. A retailer will come to you with a specific set of requirements around ingredients, price points, profit margins, etc and you'll design a formula that matches their requirements[2]. While the manufacturer is leveraging the same machinery, product formulation expertise, and procurement capabilities, the end result may be completely different than any product you actually sell in your name brand portfolio due to differences in priorities and market goals. For example, Costco, Walmart, and Dollar General may be relying on the same manufacturer for their private label trashbags. But decisions on the thickness of the plastic for the bag, whether to use "break protection" patterns on bag design, whether to incorporate draw strings or just little flaps of plastic, whether to package it in a cardboard box or plastic sleeve, etc are all made in coordination with the retailer requisitioning the private label and will end up as a distinctly different product than both the private label runs for other brands as well as the manufacturers own name brand formulations.
Ice cream is a really big one here. You'll notice that it's always sold by volume (fluid ounces) rather than weight (ounces). Manufacturers control the volume of air that gets incorporated into the ice cream, and can use the same amount of product by weight to produce a pint, quart, or half gallon of ice cream. Both within the name brand portfolio of the company and the private label runs, you'll have wildly different end products based not only on the ingredients chosen for a specific formulation but the density chosen as well.
[1] These discounters also tend to get inventory that is perfectly fine, but that didn't turn fast enough and you're willing to let go at a discount to get it out of your warehouses.
[2] You'll also see this within some name brand portfolios as well. You'll see this in the form of retailer-specific model numbers for something. This happens for lots of reasons, from Amazon having specific Alexa functionality incorporated into the version of a product to Walmart demanding a compromise on warranty period or part quality so that they can get to the retail price point they determine is most optimal.
