Why are we still paying for branded cheese when we can get double the non-branded for cheaper?
Sungmi Kim/Stuff
You could get a lot more cheese for the same price if you went for home brands.
Shoppers can buy two 800g blocks of home brand tasty cheese for less than a 1kg branded block with the same ingredients. So why do we keep going for brands over price?
At Hutt City Pak ‘n Save on Friday a 1kg block of Mainland tasty cheese was more than $21 and the brand’s 500g block was $12.
Meanwhile, Foodstuffs’ home brand Rolling Meadow 800g was $9.99, allowing customers to get 1.6kg of cheese for $20 – still cheaper than the branded 1kg block.
Since August Stuff has been collating the monthly price of essential food products at New World, Pak ‘n Save and Countdown.
READ MORE:
* Is it cheaper to buy your groceries at The Warehouse or the supermarket?
* What’s happened to supermarket prices after the freeze?
* Indoor plants: A little ray of green light in a world gone mad
The highest price a 1kg block of home brand cheese has got in the last seven months was $15.69 at Pak ‘n Save Moorhouse in Christchurch, while the cheapest was $9.79 at Pak ‘n Save Mt Albert.
Fonterra Brands NZ, which owns Mainland, Mainland Special Reserve, Kāpiti, Perfect Italiano, Galaxy and Valumetric considered its Mainland range to be a “premium everyday cheese”, while Foodstuffs said all of its home brand blocks were made in New Zealand by “reputable NZ cheese manufacturers”.
But as William Shakespeare would say “what’s in a name? That which we call a rose by any other name would smell just as sweet”. Blocks of cheese, no matter what brand name, are all made up of pasteurised cow’s milk, salt, starter culture and rennet.
Professor of marketing at Victoria University Nick Ashill said scientific evidence over many decades showed that a brand name affects how consumers think, feel and act.
RICKY WILSON/STUFF
Daisy Labs produces dairy-identical proteins – including whey – using microbes rather than livestock.
Marketers did this by using a combination of brand name,…
..