Personally I only ever buy things when they're half price so for me buying ColesWorth home brands happens when the other brands are not on sale.
That being said, I have noticed that most times the home brands are still cheaper than the other brands at half price.
What do you usually do?
Can confirm this is 100% the case with some products. (Eg: some sugar products and flours)
Source: Use to work with many different food and household distributors.
Colesworth just strong arms some businesses into packaging them the same products to distribute as “home brand” to sell cheaper than the original.
Thats not across the board for all home brand, but happens often enough.
Products like that probably aren’t much different.
They are sometimes identical, especially with goods as mentioned above.
Some home brand flour, sugar, and flavourings are exactly the same as the name brands and come out of the same production line as their would be competitors.
When colesworth cant get goods directly from a brand they stock on their shelves, they often buy it from overseas and still find a way to market it as Australian products.
@El cheepo: Back in my uni days I had a friend who had a job removing “made in China” labels from goods and putting on “made in Australia” ones. Nowadays they probably have “packed in Australia” as the get around.
More complex products have different recipes for the home brand stuff, often with cheaper/less ingredients.
Wilmar Sugar Australia?
A lot of Aldi products are like this as well. Very easy to tell when the box, plastic shape / size etc is the same.
Not if it's food.
They're too coy and crafty about where the ingredients come from.
I shop at ALDI. 97.52% of what I buy is home brand.
Is it your local Aldi, or a 2.48% imported one?
Yeah, Aldi mimics the packaging of brand names so they can pretend they are the same product. This is why I don’t tend to buy groceries at Aldi. If they are that certain of their products then use their own distinct packaging.
It appears some Aldi fanboys can’t handle the truth. They are lying to you boys, these aren’t the same products.
This isn’t some great revelation you just revealed. Nobody is going into Aldi thinking they’re buying name-brand products. Aldi sometimes stocks the name-brand product next to theirs to show how much cheaper theirs are
@FireRunner: Yeah, they copy the packaging of the brand name products to try to differentiate themselves? How many times do we hear people say they are just the same product in different packaging? I don’t mind buying stuff from the junk aisles, even then I’ve had stuff I had to take back, but I avoid their packaged produce.
@try2bhelpful: I don’t doubt they’re piggybacking off the brand recognition of the name brands. I just didn’t think anyone would consider them the same.
@FireRunner: So they set the idea they are the same quality by copying the packaging and then “rumours” start they are the same product from the same factories. Aldi knows how to play their rusted on customers. As I said if they really thought their products were quality they wouldn’t copy the packaging.
Pickup a box of wheat bix, and a box of Aldi wheat biscuits. You can prove they are identical as they have the same batch number font and format, they literally come off the same production line.
That's just one example.
Yes not all their products are the same as the leading brand, that doesn't mean none of them are
CF=0.
This is why I tend to buy groceries at Aldi.
The Woolies rocky road mallows are freaking awesome…. Idk if it’s strictly a ‘home brand’ as it’s quite different to the name brand arnotts Royals
Woolworths has a business called Woolworths Food Company that works with manufacturers to produce their own brand of products
Only buy other brands on sale, that's the correct way of doing it!
Their home brand stuff is usually the same if not better than branded stuff. Just depends on the item at end of day, but if you only buy branded stuff you're a sucker for advertisements.
Which home brand products do you find are better than the branded stuff?
Any basics like flour, salt, sugar, tissues, milk Etc. are the same so no point paying more.
In terms of better, I find oats from coles/ww to be the best. Far better than any of the branded options and cheaper to boot. The bread they bake daily is also pretty high up there and better than most brands.
The price of home brand stuff has crept up to the point of them being a giant rip off. Take chips as an example. Coles and Woolworths own brand chips used to be almost half the price of the brand names. Now there is only 40c or so between their own brand chips and the McCain superfries etc which, are vastly superior. It's the same with lots of products now.
I don't buy homebrand anymore. Other branded stuff on special is cheaper
Especially if you look at the specials.
Woolies oven fries cost more than mccain, both 1kg. I see that every week in my shopping list and wonder how they have not picked up on it.
The real question is why aren't you buying birds eye golden crunch crinkle chips. Everything else tastes like cardboard.
The real question is why aren't you buying birds eye golden crunch crinkle chips. Everything else tastes like cardboard.
The real question is why are you not buying potatoes and cooking your own?
It's not a process that requires a chef-level skill or that takes hours for preparation.
Common, I can't think of every example I've encountered, but often per gram woolies stuff is dearer in a smaller size offering making it seem better value, though the quality has improved, woolies generic frozen mixed vegies is like charf compared to Aldi's
Not everything. e.g. I found woolies brand nurofen 1/3 the price of the name brand.
You don't eat them for dinner though, do you?
?
When did this conversation become about dinner?
depends, generic stuff yeah
If you shop at Aldi you rarely have another choice.
That’s aldi private label not home brand
What's the difference apart from packaging making it look similar to brand name goods?
They market their stuff as "Like Brand" and it's truly like the quality of what they are imitating, I miss Aldi, Coles/Woolies stuff often does NOT compare well!
Not sure if you are being serious or sarcastic.
why even bother? Aldi brand stuff is better and cheaper anyway
I sometimes buy half priced brand items, and am disappointed the quality is not as good as the homebrand stuff.
Sometimes the ingredients are better in the home brand.
I always stay away with coles and woolies home brand. Waste of money tbh.
Depends on the item … and increasingly what actually is a "home brand"?
For absolute commodity-type products (sugar, salt, flour, milk, etc.) I'm quite happy with the genuine home brand stuff. I also have found some items that are branded but seem to be available in only one of the major supermarkets. Are these effectively "home brand" just by another name?
Whilst some can be interchangeable and it makes little difference, for others there are discernable quality differences. My biggest concern with the rise & spread of homebrand products is what happens when the inevitable happens and competitors are squeezed from the market? Suddenly you're left with homebrand and not much else and prices go up whilst quality has diminished.
I try the home label\house branded products, if they're similar to the branded ones will keep buying but often they aren't, for example ColesWorth bakery bread is often better than the Tiptop, Helgas, Abbott's, Buttercup, Wonder branded loaves;
flour, sugar, butter, block cheese is just as good as the basic branded stuff;
Home brand milk and yoghurt, tea, herbs, are pretty terrible - are either too watered down or poorly sealed packaging leading to loss of flavour, stick with the quality brands for those.
House brand Chocolates and confectionery we won't even touch, because it's all 'Made in China' now - that breaks the golden rule:
If it's from the Red Dragon, beware where it's been, Never let it touch your mouth or your skin.
mmmm Woolies Crunchy Honey Poppas. Sanitarium stopped making (or selling) them a few year ago
.
very product dependent. Some home brand stuff is so feral even at the cheap price it is not worth it so I do without rather than buy. some items like their english muffins can suffice in a pinch.
Depends on the products, but woolies/coles organic pasta cannot be beaten for the price. $2 for a proper Italian pasta, not that highly processed san remo rubbish for twice the price.
Coles meat pies are the best, better than all the branded stuff
Good example is laundry soaker. Coles/Aldi brand is 30% sodium percarbonate. Name brands are 20%-25%. So you pay much more for less active ingredient…no thanks.
A long time ago, i used to buy home brands, these days i do my best to avoid buying them regardless of price, As what colesworth have done over time is move people over to buying home brand and then stopped stocking other brands . Basically its a method to over time get rid of competition and then increase the price of their own products. Long term, customer gets rorted.
Plus having friends who worked in the sales departments of other brands who had to deal with colesworth, they get treated as crap as well to provide stock or even to go with the home brand label.
Criteria is price, quality of ingredients and country of origin.
We eat mostly whole food plant based so cheapest for basics like oats are home brands. Still Australian oats.
There are different types of home brands. E.g. will buy pasta sauce home brand from Italy (many branded ones are also from Italian tomatoes), but not from China.
Are all oats the same? I've been buying organic as I'm worried about pesticide residue.
Tomatoes… the whole industry is built on exploitation, nevertheless money talks. I've found practically every brand of tomato sauce (the sausage kind) is now sourced from Chinese tomato paste.
A fascinating documentary on the industry for those interested
https://youtu.be/xqbNuejnP_4
Thread would be better focused on which products are worth buying certain brands for.
Home brand/aldi frozen meals mostly now no good
I’d rather eat expired discount brand food than homebrand. The Woolworths Select is okay though. And technically Aldi is homebrand, but it’s more like clonebrand really.
Back in the day the No Frills neapolitan ice cream were just as good if not better than the branded stuff
All my brands are home brand..I shop at Aldi because I don't like to throw away my money shopping brands at woolies and coles
Have not had the pleasure of shopping at Aldi for nearly 6yrs, have planned to get my camper on the Ute then to Townsville, which is 700k's away- twice recently to look round and do an Aldi shop, both times there were weather events that stopped me … soon!
Since I'm now 700k's from an Aldi now and broke, that's my life, but, you have to look at Woolies stuff carefully (woolies is 98k's away coles is an extra 40k's further) for example, Woolies custard powder is dearer per gram than the next cheapest branded custard powder, woolies is 200gram packet, the next one is 250grams, there's heaps more like that, but that's just the one I can remember.
Depends what products. Some of them are quite obviously made in the same factory as the branded stuff with the same product, same jars/packaging, nutritional information, expiry dates etc. Would be smart to opt for the cheaper choice. Other products, maybe not so much the same quality or added value.