With the rare exception like Costco, cheaper house brands often imply they're equivalent to brand name goods, but take unadvertised shortcuts in process and/or

With the rare exception like Costco, cheaper house brands often imply they're equivalent to brand name goods, but take unadvertised shortcuts in process and/or feedstock, misleading consumers who don't take the time to carefully compare to weigh whether the shortcut is worth the value to them. This is not true. I used to have a number of consumer products clients when I was at a firm. Store-brand products are all made for the stores by name brands as part of their white label programs (excepting clothing, since the transaction flows are different for that industry). Usually the way it works is that the white label product is the same as the standard product, but with store-selected packaging. In most cases, the differences are purely cosmetic (as with cereals, which are made for most stores by General Mills and its competitors.) In a few instances, the store brand is usually a white label version of the brand name's discount brands, such as the store-brand products at the 99 Cents Only and Dollar Stores. I wouldn't mind house brands as much if supply chain information and process information was transparent across all companies, but that supply chain information is a pseudo-trade secret (and for real-time supply chain information, definitely a trade secret) [1], and you can forget about obtaining process information. This information is known within the industry. As 99.99999% of customers don't care about the supply chain of a store brand product, they don't include that information on the packaging. But then again, neither do the name brands. In some cases, you can the name of the manufacturer by asking the store's corporate office, and they'll usually tell you. Generally, they don't have access to "process information" for how the product is manufactured because they're just buying the product from the manufacturer. Whether the manufacturer will tell you depends on the product. I wouldn't go as far as to say ban house brands by law. But I wouldn't want to keep them completely unregulated in all contexts like we are currently doing, either. House brands are subject to the same regulations as name brands.