Most of them? Generics are frequently the same thing from the same manufacturer with cheaper packaging and no/very little marketing. There are very few things I’ve ever tried that were noticeably better in the name brand.
I was going to say everything. I mean its not everything but if you don’t know its always best to give them a try if the price difference is good and if you don’t like it then thats one of the few things not to get. Especially now. generics used to be pretty meh but man now they are sometimes better. Oh man dominicks had this store brand chunky peanut butter that I have not been able to find an equal to since they closed.
Sometimes store brands/generics have lower meat content for example, if you buy, say, meat balls or fish products. While other products are literally the same just with another logo. Always check the ingredients (at least in my country they give a lot of information)
oh I always compare the ingredients just like price per unit. Im one of those folks who forgets to mention things like this so thanks.
As long as your not a former roommate of mine. He would calculate price per slice of bread and buy the cheapest. He would do this for everything and would take hours shopping…
Im not that bad but I do sorta consider it a puzzle game. Sorta a “fun” math activity to keep my brain active like doing suduko. Honestly I don’t see a point at price per slice as you would just get really thinly sliced bread. Should be per ounce. Honestly bread is one of those things I spring for the xspenciv stuff in the bakery section or I will do one of the fancy brownberry type with oats and nuts or potato.
I understand where you come but I do sympathize with him(he had 4 kids from 2 mother’s so money was always tight). He took FOREVER shopping though.
One time we went shopping together, I got all my food, checked out, drove home, put all my food away, took a shower, watched a show on Netflix, drove back to the store and he said “almost done, 10 more minutes”…
ouch. don’t tell you friend but the opening montage of idiocracy comes to mind.
Unless it’s Kroger, never buy Kroger brand.
Interesting. Outside of chips, I’ve had a lot of luck with Private Selection (Kroger’s no name brand). I’ve had quality issues with Food Lion and Walmart’s perishables, but not as often with Kroger. Kroger’s non perishables don’t seem to be much different than Walmart’s though.
Private Selection isn’t bad, I was referring to Kroger brand as in it actually says Kroger, which is a suffering I wish on no one. It’s also worth noting that Private Selection is a substantial bump in price over plain Kroger brand.
Still pretty cheap, but yeah. I’ve had little from the Kroger line that I’d buy again, so that’s fair enough.
Any drugs. If you’re not familiar with medications, just look at the active ingredients. They’re most likely the same or very similar dosages.
Also, sleep aids are usually just diphenhydramine, aka Benadryl.
I’m not a doctor or a pharmacist. But just because it has the same ingredients doesn’t mean it is the same. The way the medication is packaged, what fillers it has, etc. may have an impact on the way it works. Anecdotally I’ve heard of people having a different reaction to namebrand and generic because of some of these factors.
Good point, and worth keeping in mind! At the same time, the generics are often so much cheaper it’s worth a try. I take Claratin daily for allergies and the Costco version is literally 10% the cost of name brand. It’s astounding how much of a markup basic OTC drugs can have.
This is common knowledge.
This is why a lot of insurances only cover the brand name ones if there is a problem with the generic.
Vitamins and health supplements too. My mom works at a pretty big brand name one of them and they literally package the exact same stuff for a generic brand that’s half the price.
Potato.
Really as long as they are labeled correctly and not like dairy treat vs ice cream it’s probably fine
Personally I don’t care about brand names but about quality, as long as it’s not shit just buy the cheaper options. Mostly the brand stuff isn’t worth it, at least here in Czech republic but here’s whole different problem with us getting all the shittiest products from EU.
I’d say the other way around. The store brand version has nearly always been fine, in my experience. I’d instead use the store brand and make a list of cases where the store brand isn’t okay. At least in my experience, it’s pretty limited. What I can recall having bad experiences with, off-the-cuff:
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Soup. I have had some pretty disappointing store brand canned soups.
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Things with motors, like small kitchen appliances, blenders and the like. I’ve had a bunch of generic ones of those fail before.
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Sodas. These aren’t exactly the same. Some people particularly prefer the taste of one root beer or whatever, and it might be that they prefer a name brand. That being said, there are also people who prefer store brands, so…shrugs
There are also a few cases where I’ve run into a particular brand that doesn’t have a store clone, and where I really like the name-brand product.
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Pretzels. I particularly like Dot’s. I haven’t seen a store brand clone of Dot’s.
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Sardines. Bit of a niche, but I once went on some website with some guy that was absolutely rabid about sardines, reviewed them, wrote huge amounts about them. My dad always liked eating canned sardines on crackers. Tried a couple different brands, and yeah, there is a difference, but the big one is that stores in the US don’t normally have heavily-smoked sardines (well, okay, sprats) in oil. I started eating Latvian “Riga Gold” sprats in oil, and they’re just amazing. I don’t like a lot of foods I’ve tried from Eastern Europe, but man, they hit it out of the ballpark on that. I don’t think that we have a US-based comparable manufacturer.
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Red Windsor cheese. It’s not all that fancy, just cheddar with some port wine marbled in, but I really like the taste. Same thing on this – I don’t think that there are any companies in the US that make the stuff, so it’s name brand or nothing.
If someone did clone any of the last three, though, I’d give 'em a try.
Trader Joe’s smoked sardines in olive oil is delicious.
I’ll piggyback on your comment with Worcestershire sauce.
Lea & Perrins make the original Worcestershire sauce, they also have never disclosed the full recipe, just the ingredients.
There are store brands and even Heinz makes a sauce. None of them are as good as the original.
Yea the heinz one sucked. I had to Chuck it I just couldn’t get through it.
Heinz is particularly bad, they use soy sauce and corn syrup, and I don’t think ferment it at all.
Whereas Lea & Perrins use zero soy, and ferment the sauce.
The absolute worst part about it all is that Lea & Perrins was bought out by Heinz in 2005, and yet the Heinz branded sauce is still shit flavored water.
The original is still made the same way, and is still good.
Mac and cheese is another with significant variety in flavor between brands.
Honestly, while not exactly the same, the Walmart Great Value Mac and Cheese is almost identical to Kraft Dinner. Slightly different noodles, and the cheese powder is fairly pale compared to the striking yellow name brand stuff, but once the milk and butter is mixed in the colour comes out and it looks and tastes pretty damn close.
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In Canada, No Name Brand. All the products are in non eye-catching packaging, and are quite cheap. They are quite popular with the college and university housing crowds.
Most things but I just wouldn’t buy processed food branded or unbranded.
Frozen vegetables. They all grew out of the same earth, possibly even at the same farm. The only difference is the packaging.
Except frozen peas
Good quality frozen peas are heavenly, most store brand bags taste like nothing and are somehow dry even if cooked in water
It’s fine to buy , but tastes differ A LOT. try it with same veggie frozen and fresh, you can taste the difference right away
The comment is comparing generic to brand-name frozen vegetables, not frozen to fresh vegetables
Breakfast cereal 100%
I’d go out of my way to buy Malt-o-Meal cereals even if they weren’t cheaper. Marshmallow Mateys 4 Lyfe!
I don’t recommend the generic for mini wheats though. I tried it, and as someone who always seeks the store brand for stuff I was not impressed.
I like store brand oat loops more than Cheerios. I feel like they are less powdery.
Non organic and GMO foods. Oftentimes the only difference is the label. Even if truly “non GMO” that doesn’t count for the thousands of years worth of selective breeding that are basically GMOs with extra steps.
Not to mention for organic and GMO food they often use a shit ton of pesticides because they can’t use plants with built in insect resistance.
Another, perhaps controversial, item are non cage free/free range eggs and meat. Similar to the first point, most of these only differ in label and there is often no difference. Even if they are free range and certified by the government, the official definition for free range is a maximum of 5 chickens for a 1x1meter of space, hardly free range. Cage free is even worse, instead of many small cages it’s essentially one large cage with thousands of chickens and much greater chance for workers to step on and crush them while attempting to work.
Food should be cheap but a company’s soul objective is to increase revenue (high prices) and reduce cost (inhumane conditions). Even farmers markets are corrupted, many of the stands there sell goods from large producers to capitalize on peoples willingness to spend more for “local” and “humanely” produced goods.
That being said if they are genuinely a local farmer doing honest work then please support them. They need all the help they can get.
Birthday/Christmas cards
Nobody in this generation buys those. I’d guess nobody younger than boomers has a significant percentage buying them regularly.
I’m a zoomer and I both buy and love receiving those.
I would say pretty much anything. The only time I got a cheaper brand and absolutely hated it was when I saw a pack of Bar-S hot dogs for like $0.60. You know how the stereotype is that hotdogs are made from feet and assholes? Those Bar-S fuckers tasted like they actually were.
Sometimes the off brand is even better than the name brand. Oreos, for example, are way better than Hydrox.
Gotta disagree with the Oreo part.
Getting rid of trans fats definitely knocked Oreo down a peg in taste.
They’re still fine, and the huge amount of different kinds of definitely nice. But Hydrox beats the current regular Oreo imo.
I’ll go one step further and say some of the generic store brands are better. Sring cheese I find is often better when it’s store brand or a generic brand. Tends to be lower fat which makes it denser, more stringy, not just a stick of mozzarella.
Kroger zesty dill pickles blow all other brands out of the water. I don’t know how they do it
Everything but eyedrops
In the EU, any certified “organic” product
Worst comment on here. Not using poison to keep of pests and having to have some decency about how abuse methods are for the land you work on is usually a good thing. The eco labels in the EU mean something. We could argue about how they could be even better, but they’re certainly better than not having any. I don’t know about other places though. Something to avoid is made up labels or esoteric bs like Demeter.
In the US, organic-labeled products typically used way more pesticides than non-organic because organic growing is much more vulnerable to pests. They just need to be approved “organic” pesticides. It’s a meaningless label here.
To add on to this explanation, the food industry in the US is chock full of fake marketing terms that are designed to get more eco-conscious consumers to fall into their trap. This is a problem across large swathes of the food industry, but one of the most egregious is chicken.
- “No antibiotics” is supposed to mean the chicken was never given antibiotics (shocker, I know). There is no regular methodology for verifying this label is accurate outside of random sampling of poultry at slaughter.
- “No hormones” is a completely useless label you’ll see used all the time. Hormones are not allowed in the production of chickens for slaughter in the US.
- “Cage free” is another tricky one. Chickens are almost never kept in cages when raised for slaughter. Hens are frequently kept in cages for egg-laying purposes. If you see this on chicken breast packaging it probably doesn’t mean anything.
- “Free-range” means the chicken had some kind of access to “outside.” There are no standards for how much “outside” space is required or what that “outside” space has to look like.
So unfortunately a bit more legwork is required to make sure product labeling statements are actually worth something. That’s a problem in the US, but the opposite side of the coin is problematic too (like how many people now attribute “GMO” as meaning “toxic”).
My brother in law works as a biologist for a large processed food company and he has to measure and track all the different batches of food they process. According to him it’s the exact opposite, there are measurable amounts of pesticide in all of the non-organic foods they get in (apples, sweet potatoes, etc) and absolutely zero measurable amount of pesticides in the organic food they receive.
I used to think the same as you until hearing it from him that it’s an actual measurable difference and the exact opposite of what I thought.
Worst comment on here
Why do you say that? Please elaborate.
Not using poison to keep of pests and having to have some decency about how abuse methods are for the land you work on is usually a good thing.
Please translate that sentence into English, or German if that´s easier for you.
The eco labels in the EU mean something. We could argue about how they could be even better, but they’re certainly better than not having any.
I agree with that
Something to avoid is made up labels or esoteric bs like Demeter.
In fact Demeter is much more “organic” than stuff with just the EU Bio label, because their rules are way more strikt. I really don´t care if the farmers bury cow horns filled with manure in their fields during a full moon while praising Rudolf Steiner, if their products are simply of better quality than EU Bio label products and why would I? Everybody is free to live the way they choose …
