Inflation was high, economic growth was stagnant, and food prices were soaring: It was the 1970s, and everyone needed to eat to stay alive, but no one had any money. So a few enterprising grocery stores had an idea—they began purchasing their own food straight from the manufacturer, putting it in ostentatiously no-frills packaging, and selling it for significantly less than the name-brand stuff. These products were called “generics,” and if out-of-control costs were the problem, they were the solution.

Well, sort of. The peas were starchy; the corn was bland. Generics weren’t awful, but they weren’t that good, either. “They basically were kind of a lesser version of products that people wanted to buy,” Gavan Fitzsimons, a professor of marketing and psychology at Duke University, told me. Before Fitzsimons was a consumer psychologist, he was a high-school stock clerk at his local grocery store, and he remembers a lot of the store-brand stuff being “terrible.” It went on the bottom shelf, and both the retailer and the consumer knew that it was an inferior product. “There was,” Greg Sleter, the executive editor of the trade publication Store Brands, told me, “nothing sexy about it.” People hated generics so much that the name itself became a mild insult, synonymous with anything unoriginal or uninspired.

Fifty years later, inflation is (pretty) high, economic growth is stagnant, food prices are soaring, and Americans are once again turning to store-brand goods: In 2024, sales grew 3.9 percent, and the year before that, 5 percent. But this time, people actually want to be buying the stuff. One survey indicates that in 2023 and 2024, more than half of shoppers made decisions about where to shop based on stores’ brands, compared with a third in 2016. If grocery-store products used to be unremarkable, undesirable, inferior—the thing you bought because it was cheap and available—they have, over the past decade or so, become a draw. And they genuinely, truly taste much better than they used to.

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The new term of art for a store or house brand is private label, and it comes with all the surface-level signifiers of exclusivity and refinement that phrase is meant to connote: chic packages, blandly appealing brand names, unique and limited-edition flavors, even if the quality is variable. Walk into a Target or Wegmans or Whole Foods now, and the house-branded pasta, canned beans, and salad dressings are likely to be on a middle shelf, at eye level, where grocers put the stuff they want you to see. These products are sometimes the exact same as those from national brands—the somewhat misleading grocery-industry term for name brands, such as Coca-Cola and Lysol—just in different packaging. Sometimes, they’re the same with small tweaks. But more and more often, these products are conceived by the grocery-store company itself and then formulated in partnership with a manufacturer, at higher quality than they would have been a decade or two ago. At this point, from both a taste perspective and a branding perspective, “a lot of people would be hard-pressed to tell what are actually the private-label brands and what are the national brands,” Jeff Wells, who edits the industry publication Grocery Dive, told me.

Grocery stores have a huge incentive to invest in their own private-label goods. The margins on these goods are higher, because they’re being sold directly to consumers, and they give grocery stores bargaining power in the market, because stores are now less reliant on individual middleman suppliers to stock their shelves. Private-label goods are also free marketing, a chance for the grocery store to get its brand in front of people—“It’s like the restaurant’s name on matchbooks,” Michael Ruhlman, the author of Grocery: The Buying and Selling of Food in America, told me. They are, simply put, a great deal for grocers. This is why Joe Coulombe—you might know him better as Trader Joe—decided to go all in on his own type of grocery-store-branded products, ones that were cheaper than national brands but had more personality than generics.

Coulombe took a little while to figure it out, but when it worked, it really worked. Trader Joe’s is one of the greatest success stories in American grocery stores—the stuff of business-school case studies and rapturous (and, honestly, sometimes baffling) consumer behavior. Just about all the major grocery stores have “programs built on the same essential DNA” as Trader Joe’s, as Benjamin Lorr writes in The Secret Life of Groceries. Ten or 20 years ago, a big grocery chain might have brought in consultants to help develop its house brand; now stores have in-house divisions devoted to this work, Wells told me: “They’re hiring packaging designers and brand marketers and people who, in some cases, have worked for these national brands.”

The house-brand boom has been made possible, in large part, by the fact that grocery stores, because they sell a lot of goods under one roof, know basically everything about how you eat—when and where and how often you shop, what you buy, in some cases what you don’t buy. Big packaged-good brands, on the other hand, have much more limited data: They mostly rely on what the grocery stores themselves tell them, and what they can glean from consumer-data companies such as Nielsen. My local Whole Foods, for instance, knows that yesterday, I bought a bag of fusillotti, a hunk of parm, and two lemons at 6:11 p.m.; the fusilotti maker knows only that it sells Whole Foods a certain number of cases of pasta a month.

Read: The most miraculous—and overlooked—type of milk

So using those data, grocery stores are developing ever-more-specialized products, with new and unique flavors that align with larger food trends: spicy dill-pickle potato chips at Kroger, “cookies & crème” granola at Target. “They’re at the bleeding edge of flavor trends,” Wells told me, whereas “it used to be that private label was a step or two or three behind.” Grocery stores are also creating brands to sell these ever-more-specialized products to ever-more-segmented consumer groups—now a store might have a dedicated brand just for plant-based foods, or for wine, or for Millennials, or for discerning home cooks. Each one can get a respectable name such as Simple Truth and Kindfull. Target alone has 59 different house brands, including nine distinct wine labels. Last year, Walmart launched a “culinary-first” grocery brand, whatever that means.

When robust data and sophisticated research and development collide with novelty culture, you get new things to buy. For example, until recently, if you wanted canned whipped cream, you probably bought Reddi-wip. The company was founded in 1948 and is best known for making one flavor: plain. Now Target, under its Favorite Day house brand, sells “whipped dairy topping” in all kinds of seasonal flavors—including, right now, lavender lemonade, peaches and cream, and sweet-cream cold foam. People are very enthusiastic about this; when the Instagram account @snackolator posted about Target’s new spring flavors, more than 35,000 users smashed the “Like” button. A can of Favorite Day dairy topping is $3.59—cheaper than Reddi-wip at Target, but not cheaper than Reddi-wip at some other stores. “Some of these price points,” Sleter told me, “are creeping toward the equal level of national brands.”

As such, private labels may be losing the very thing that makes them appealing in the first place: their cheap, uncomplicated basic-ness, or what the Wharton marketing professor Americus Reed II calls their appeal to “efficient misers.” “People observe these private-label brands growing, and then there are more and more of them, and then they offer less utility,” he told me. At some point, a slickly packaged, not-so-inexpensive private label begins to seem like any other brand—premiocre, endless, engineered using big data and expensive marketing—and then you might as well buy the national brand. When it’s brands, brands, brands, all the way down, they start feeling simply generic: nothing special about them.

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