What's in a Name?

The question I'm interested in exploring for this post is whether name brand food items are "better" for you, as many people (including myself, most of the time) assume. "Better" in this case would be defined as of higher quality, meaning healthier ingredients and taste.

My method was to compare the ingredients list, nutrition label, and price of the brand name products with their generic counterparts.

Welch's vs Safeway Grape Juice

The best identical side-by-side comparison of ingredient/nutrition lists I found was between the Safeway 100% Grape Juice and Welch's 100% Grape Juice. Juice is a pretty straight-forward item on the grocery shelves (let's hope the 100% juice doesn't have a huge list of ingredients, anyway), so it's fairly obvious that the two products should be the same. However, I bet many people reach for the Welch's juice anyway based on the company's labeling and TV advertisements-- simply because it looks better on the shelf-- even though it's the same product as the $1.00 cheaper Safeway juice.

Lucerne (left) vs Yoplait (right) light raspberry yogurt

I browsed the aisles a bit more and came to a product where, I believe, the generic brand was actually better in quality than the name brand. I compared Safeway's brand of Lucerne light raspberry yogurt with Yoplait's light red raspberry yogurt. The ingredients were roughly the same, except the Yoplait yogurt also listed Sugar, Citric Acid, Acetate, and used Aspartame as a sweetener whereas Lucerne used Sucralose. The Lucerne product was 0.40 cents cheaper per pound and had a much more familiar ingredients list. On this particular product I decided to do a taste test, and bought the two items. My conclusion was that the Yoplait item was more flavorful and sweet, but the items were definitely similar in taste quality.

Kellogg's ($3.50) vs Great Value ($2.68)

To further explore generic quality items, I ventured to Moscow's Walmart. There I found the sugary wonder of Walmart's generic substitute for Kellogg's Frosted Flakes, named Great Value Sugar Frosted Flakes. Again, there was about a dollar difference in the two items (Great Value for $2.68, Kellogg's for $3.50) but it became quickly apparent that they were different products, ingredient-wise. The Great Value listed degermed yellow corn meal (rather than Kellogg's milled corn) and high fructose corn syrup. In the nutrition label, the Great Value box displayed 13 grams of sugar per 3/4 cup (compared to Kellogg's 8 grams for 3/4 cup), 200 mg of sodium (vs Kellogg's 160mg), and only 2% fiber (compared to Kellogg's 10%.) I didn't buy these two for a taste test, but it seems that the slightly-more-spendy Kellogg's would be the healthier choice.

As Michael Pollan put it in a recent article on his website, "there are generics, and then there are generics." His point here is that some generic brands are nearly identical in terms of ingredients to the brand name foods (meaning you're just paying for the fancy label and advertising if you buy the brand name), but other generic brands actually compromise quality by being reformulated or made with cheap ingredients. The link to the article is here:

http://michaelpollan.com/articles-archive/michael-pollan-answers-readers-questions/

I was able to discover both of the two "types" of generics on the grocery aisle shelves-- the one essentially the same as the brand name (i.e. Welch's vs Safeway Grape Juice) and the one made with varying (and often questionable) ingredients (i.e. Kellogg's vs Great Value's Frosted Flakes.)

So, the brand name doesn't always mean the product is "better" than the generic item. If you're smart about your grocery shopping, taking time to compare and contrast labels can keep you from spending unnecessary money on brand name items, or expose some unsettling generic substitutes you should avoid. There's always merit in investigating.