“Depending on the retailer, there are some who have store brands that are higher quality than the national brand,” Bergen said.
Despite lingering perceptions that store brands cut corners, industry experts said private-label products are held to the same food safety regulations as national brands.
“If you go by food safety, it’s exactly the same thing. I don’t care who you are, you have to fall in the same exact regulation,” said Petros Levis, vice president of research, design and implementation at TreeHouse Foods. “Flour is flour, it comes out of Kansas.”
Today’s private labels are more deliberate, he said. Many private-label manufacturers “strip it down to what is valuable.”
There can be variation in the ingredients between private labels and national brands.
“The really tasty inputs are expensive, so think of it as like a chicken salad. There’s less chicken in the lower quality one because it keeps [the manufacturers’] costs down, but they’re good enough now at managing the store brands that they can compete on quality,” Bergen said.
0 Comments