The world’s largest retailer has the world’s leading store brands. Shoppers stock up on store brands in places like ALDI and Trader Joe’s. But one of the best-loved grocery chains, as rated in a number of shopper surveys, has a selection of store brands that don’t seem to be leaping off the shelves.
Numerator’s latest Private Label Trends Tracker offers new insights about what shoppers think of store brand products, how many they buy – and where they buy them.
The runaway winner in Numerator’s rankings of the leading store brand sellers, is Walmart. Five Walmart brands are regularly found in more than half of U.S. homes. Over the past year, 86% of shoppers have purchased a Great Value product. Walmart’s Equate, Mainstays, Marketside and Freshness Guaranteed brands all have two-thirds or more household penetration. Rounding out the top ten are store brands from Dollar Tree and ALDI, Target’s Up & Up, Costco’s Kirkland Signature, along with another Walmart brand, Pen + Gear.
Some retailers are nipping at Walmart’s heels, however. Kroger’s “Smart Way” is the fastest-growing private label brand, more than doubling sales over the past year. Dollar Tree’s B Pure and Market Basket, along with Walgreens’ Complete Home, are close behind.
Stores that offer the most private label products, naturally, sell the most of them. 80% of ALDI’s sales are ALDI-brand products, while 69% of Trader Joe’s sales are Trader Joe’s brands. Club stores like Costco and Sam’s Club do about a third of their business in store brands. The grocery chain that’s highest on the list is H-E-B.
On the opposite side of the scale, though, sits Publix. Only 16% of its sales are store brand products, the lowest percentage of all major retailers with physical footprints in Numerator’s report.
Publix is regularly rated among shoppers’ favorite grocery chains. It was tied for first place in the American Customer Satisfaction Index’s most recent ranking earlier this year, and a recent Advantage Solutions survey found that Publix shoppers say the store has the best deals.
What it doesn’t have, are household-name store brands. Great Value products are practically synonymous with Walmart, and most everyone knows where Kirkland Signature products come from. Aside from Publix’s natural and organic private label brand called Greenwise, its only other private label brand is pretty generic. “Publix brand,” it’s called. That’s no knock on the quality, which can be quite good. But “Publix brand” stands out only as a cheaper alternative to name brands, and not a brand in its own right.
Many Publix shoppers, however, come for the name brands. In the Advantage Solutions survey, 73% of Publix shoppers said they shop there because it has the best deals, offering “quality favorites at a price they can afford.” And as any couponer can tell you, getting a deal on a name brand can often be less expensive than buying the ostensibly lower-cost store brand.
Publix isn’t alone in playing catchup, though, as private label sales at Walgreens, Ahold Delhaize, Dollar General, Wakefern and Albertsons are all below 20% as well.
Overall, Numerator found that shopper opinions about store brands are mixed. 43% of those surveyed said they buy private label items to save money. 58% say store brands offer an above-average value for their price, but only 29% think they’re just as good as name brands.
And yet that doesn’t stop most of us from buying store brands anyway. Every single shopper in Numerator’s survey reported buying at least one private label grocery product over the past year. And very nearly all shoppers bought private label products in the Health & Beauty, Household Products and Home & Garden categories.
Numerator once called Walmart “the private label gateway drug,” where shoppers were most likely to try a private label product for the very first time. So Walmart’s investment in several store brands seems to be paying off. As one of the country’s favorite grocery chains, Publix is doing just fine without coming anywhere close to Walmart’s store brand sales. But as shoppers continue looking for ways to pinch pennies and stretch their grocery budgets, the grocery stores with the most affordable products – store brand or otherwise – is likely to emerge the winner.
Image source: Publix
