About once a year, some dusty old post from this site will “pop” and go viral. My post on private label grocery products from May of 2017 is the latest.
Link: National vs Store Brands
For some reason, it’s the top read post of 2025, after sitting mostly ignored for the last 8 years. After its 2017 debut (with a few hundred views), it fell large obscurity with only 20-50 views a year from 2018 to 2024.
In January of this year it suddenly took off in popularity with hundreds of views a month – over 2K in total! I think credit goes to a Dutch personal finance blogger “Elsewhere Life” at Eldersleven.nl. I see a lot of inbound traffic from that site (though you will need your browser to translate for you to look at it).
The popularity of this article caused me to look at the boxes and cans in my own pantry this morning (photo above). I was actually surprised to see how little private label products are on our shelves, despite my advocacy for saving some money in that initial post. Just the few packages on the right side of the photo.
I guess after a career marketing national brands at MegaCorp, I’m more tied to them than I thought!
Next time I go shopping I’m going to challenge myself to “audition” some more store brands to adopt into our routine. At 15-25% savings, they deliver an amazing ROI when you like the quality you get.
How often do you buy store brand groceries?
Image: Pixabay
MrFireStation 
Hi! Mr. EldersLeven here from The Netherlands. Yep, I am one of these old-fashioned bloggers who still have a blogroll, and your blog is one of the ‘inhabitants’. My blogroll is a mix of FIRE- and Homesteading blogs, after our recent move out of the city to the countryside. I have no clue as to why that triggers the popularity of the store brands blog, as people are always sent to your latest post… Or it may be because the Dutch are famous penny-pinchers…
Love reading your blog! But I guess my English is better than your Dutch 😉
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Nice to meet you, sir! Thanks for including me on your blog. Yes, you do speak better English than I do Dutch. That said, my mother‘s family came from Holland. We have visited there several times and enjoy the country very much! A lot of Dutch people came to the US and settled in Wisconsin. Their last name was Liefbroer. I did not know that the Dutch were known for being Penny pinchers… My wife is Scottish, they are certainly known for being thrifty, too!
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We use unbranded commodities such as sugar, flour, rice, popcorn and dried beans. We stick with branded where we can taste the difference including Ketchup, Dijon Mustard, Pasta Sauce, Mayonnaise, Sauerkraut, Sourdough Baguettes and Chili Spices. Costco has some really nice private label products such as their Feta and Pecorino Cheese which are very good and better than their name brand competitors. For example their Feta comes from Greece and is made from goat’s milk like it is supposed to be.
Some branded producers are starting to bubble up to the surface of my dividend stock screener. General Mills – GIS is selling at a five year low PE and has 4.97% current yield. Their dividend growth was slower than normal this year at only 1.7%. Pepsi – PEP is also selling at a five year low and has a current yield of 4.08% with a 5% dividend increase this year. Kraft Heinz – KHC is also selling at a five year low with a 6% current yield, but has not raised their dividend since 2019. They seem to be a mess. They bought Heinz and now they are spinning them off.
I bought some Pepsi a little over a month ago because the sum of the current yield plus dividend increase is 9%. Tack on some price recovery and it should return over 10% for the next couple years. GIS is working to get their sales increasing again. These stocks are selling cheap but not anything like the bargains that were on sale during the 2008 – 2010 financial crisis when you could pick up name brand stocks such as Home Depot and Microsoft when they were paying over 4% current yield and were growing their dividends in the high teens to low 20% annually.
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Branded consumer packaged goods are in a tough place right now. Kellogg’s just got sold to a French company. There will be other M&A activity in the space, I am sure. At GIS, there has been a lot of change, impacting former colleagues and friends. I do know they have always been committed to increasing their dividend every year for the last 100+ years.
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Kellogg’s buyer is Ferrero and is an Italian Company best known in the US for Ferrero Rocher Chocolate covered hazelnuts. In Europe, their Nutella hazelnut cocoa spread was their original product. They used to be a customer of mine. They seem to be on a buying spree in the US. A couple years ago they bought the Blue Bunny Ice Cream brand in Iowa. Ferrero is a private company, so they are likely taking a longer term view and figure MAHA is overhyped. MAHA will create an environment in the US that they have already had to deal with in Europe for at least a couple decades.
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Agree – they also bought the Keebler business a few years ago.
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We don’t pay much attention to brands or off-brand products, but then again, we prepare a lot of food from scratch. We also don’t eat cereal other than my morning Oatmeal which is traditional Quaker five minutes on the stove. We don’t shop at Costco as it is only two of us and the quantities and distance to travel to the store don’t make sense for us. One area of overpaying is buying Coke in small 8 ounce cans. We drink very little each of us consuming perhaps one can per week, Kroger used to make an off-brand cola superior to our taste than coke, but that disappeared a few years ago.
I admit to having bought Hunts tomatoes as in your photo but there was no price difference in the store brand and I liked the pop top lid versus needing a can opener. Yes, we make our own sauce for pasta and lasagna, we open a lot of cans. There is no discernable difference store brand or fancy and I suspect it is all the same product until the labels are applied.
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Hunts is a pretty big private label manufacturer, so you may be right on the similarities in that category. At the food MegaCorp that I worked at we had a no private label policy. We once acquired a small private label waffle business as part of a bigger deal, but shut that down.
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