Re: Determining who makes house brands


"phaeton" <blahbleh666@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:ffce5292-7801-48c5-82a5-3a0e397818f6@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
On Dec 13, 10:23 am, Dave Smith <adavid.sm...@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
graham wrote:
I worked in a Unilever-owned canning factory during the long vac while
at
university (too many years ago!). They produced three lines of dried
peas
with the best going out under the company name. The second line had a %
of
lower quality peas and went to a chain of shops owned by the company and
the
third had a much higher % of poor quality peas and had the Woolworth's
label. It was similar for the tomato soup - not the quality necessarily,
but the recipes.

It was interesting to see in the tainted pet food incident a few years
ago that there were dozens on brand name foods all coming from the same
manufacturer. Similarly, a more recent problem with processed meat
recall that there were about a dozen brands of meats all being processed
by the same company.

There used to be all sorts of fruit canning factories around here. They
are all gone now, but the last one to go was canning fruit for several
major name brands.

I'm curious to know too. My theory is that a food processing plant
will do some QA on the raw product coming in the door- say...
tomatoes. They'll use the best tomatoes for their 'name brand' stuff,
and the 'seconds' for the house brand. That's my guess.

One thing I do notice though, is that whenever you compare the labels
for store branded vs. name branded, the store brand has higher
sodium. 9 times out of 10, easy. Perhaps they're using it to 'mask'
the inferior materials?

-J

**********************************************************

I can tell you from personal working experience that store branded canned
vegetables may or may not be lower grade than the name brand. I used to
work for a major label canning company when I was in my early 20's. It all
depends on what the store has contracted to buy under their label. Some buy
the A grade, others do not. Those buying the A grade are getting the exact
same product with no alterations or changes to the product. This was true
for both canned and frozen bagged vegetables. In fact, the canned
vegetables weren't even labeled at all until they were needed to be shipped.
They were all stored unlabeled in the warehouse, then labeled when a
contract to purchase came in. A store may stock Green Giant as their major
brand, but that doesn't mean their house brand was also packed by Green
Giant. They could easily be getting grade A or grade B product from another
major canner not sold in your store such as Del Monte, which would account
for the difference in nutritional labeling. Looking at the stamped codes on
the bottoms of the cans will give you a hint as to whether or not they were
canned by the same company or not. If they're the same pattern they
probably were, if not, then they were packaged by someone else.

For what it's worth, most of our grade B product was purchased for shipment
overseas or by southern grocery chains (a lot of it seemed to ship to
Oklahoma). It should also be noted that some grocery chains would buy both
grade A and grade B product, so depending on what part of the country you
live in depends on what you'd get.

Jinx


.

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