Comparing apples with apples (where one has a worm)

This hit the news a week or two ago.

Apparently Federal Government 'research' shows that people could be saving $450 a year by buying home brand grocery items and that they are purchasing brand name staples that are 'no different' to the home brand product.

Now, I'm no brand snob. I do prefer to save money where I can. We do buy home brand staples where we find the product quality adequate for our needs. Doing otherwise would be pretty stupid.

However, it is misleading to say that they're all the same- even basic staples. Here's just one experience I've had with 'house brand' products:



We once bought some organic self-raising flour that was labelled under one of the Coles home brands (You'll Love Coles?). How different could it be from the other organic flours? Well... first there was the fact that, when sifted, it left little rock-hard balls of white stuff in the sieve (and I mean rock hard). Then there was the fact that its rising powers were so poor that I may as well have used plain flour. Unfortunately I'd bought two bags of it. We tossed out the first and gave the second a go- it was just as bad. I considered asking for a refund but, like most consumers, it was simpler to just let it go and go back to buying trusty old White Wings. Sure it might be twice the price, but twice the price is nothing when you consider the Coles brand was a pile of crap. I simply haven't 'experimented' with flour since. When you're cooking with one of these staple foods and it turns out the staple is a vastly inferior product, you're not just wasting the staple, you're wasting a bunch of other foods too- eggs, milk, sugar, butter, spices, chocolate, whatever else happens to be an ingredient in what you're cooking. That's pretty wasteful, not to mention potentially expensive.

So when Consumer Affairs Minister Craig Emerson tells us

"These are savings right before your eyes, it's just about what you select."

"I am not trying to tell people to buy inferior products," he added. "But on these essentials, where there is no difference in quality, the savings can be massive - 50 per cent off."

Dr Emerson said that Coles and Woolworths food technologists had confirmed the products in his comparison study were identical.

I find it pretty damn patronising. I have a degree in food science and nutrition. I know what's involved in testing products to determine the exact levels of pretty much anything you'd care to name (actually, I lie, I'd have to look most of them up, a lot of the procedures were fairly complicated!). And I am willing to bet that the food technologists who confirmed that the products were identical didn't carry out lab tests and didn't carry out kitchen tests to confirm that the products performed identically. They would've looked at the ingredients and the nutrition panel (self raising flour- ingredients: flour, raising agents X, Y & Z; butter: cream, salt, min. 82% butterfat etc etc) and gone "Yeah, no difference there"

My point? Sometimes there's a good reason people stick with the brand they know.