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When did generic grocery brands get so good looking?

eyeondesign.aiga.org

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Re: When did generic grocery brands get so good looking?

#71

Post by dctoedt »

lurquer wrote: post #3

I miss the old old generic food packaging... It had its own special aisle. Big cans with white labels that merely said “BEANS” or “CORN” in fat black letters. Of course, it was embarrassing to have a cart full of that stuff as everyone would know you were poor.

When I was growing up in the 1960s, my dad (career Air Force) would buy low-priced booze at the "Class 6" store (the on-base PX liquor store that didn't use taxpayer funds). The beer came in pure-white cans, each of which had, in big black stenciled letters, "B E E R"; my dad said he'd been told it was Budweiser but Anheuser-Busch didn't want the brand associated with low prices.

Re: When did generic grocery brands get so good looking?

#73

Post by antihero »

breakfastduck wrote: post #66
rahimnathwani wrote: post #62

In the UK, until recently, supermarkets had three levels of own brand: Tesco: - Value - Tesco - Finest Sainsburys: - Basics - Sainsburys - Taste the Difference The packaging for the lowest tier was simple and used minimal colour (I think deliberately). The packaging for the highest tier was fancy (e.g. more saturated colours, use of metallic lettering). If you have one own-label brand, you want to make it attractive.…

Notably Tesco started selling under the brand 'Stockwell & Co' for their super value items. I was curious myself when I saw it and it is indeed a 'Tesco exclusive' manufacturer that essentially sells everything that would previously have gone under the 'value' brand.

Yeah it seems like a bunch of the supermarkets have rebranded their economy stuff as "made-up" brands. Interested to figure out the reason for this.

Re: When did generic grocery brands get so good looking?

#74

Post by kradeelav »

theamk wrote: post #16

Unrelated to actual content: if you visit the site with ad-blocker on, it does not load. Instead, you just have this icon of the eye looking at you and blinking. And the eye will just blink until you turn ad-blocker off. I know the site is called "eye on design", but the associations of user tracking via ads and this blinking eye were amusing to me. Imagine having a blinking eye in the corner of each website for each…

That's odd.. may I ask which ad-blocker you were using? I visited it with both Privacy Badger & uBlock Origin running (on FF) and it loaded for me.

Re: When did generic grocery brands get so good looking?

#76

Post by ars »

theamk wrote: post #16

Unrelated to actual content: if you visit the site with ad-blocker on, it does not load. Instead, you just have this icon of the eye looking at you and blinking. And the eye will just blink until you turn ad-blocker off. I know the site is called "eye on design", but the associations of user tracking via ads and this blinking eye were amusing to me. Imagine having a blinking eye in the corner of each website for each…

And if you leave the page alone for a while, a bunch of eyes will show up and partially cover the content. They go away if you click them.

Re: When did generic grocery brands get so good looking?

#77

Post by rob74 »

antihero wrote: post #73
breakfastduck wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Notably Tesco started selling under the brand 'Stockwell & Co' for their super value items. I was curious myself when I saw it and it is indeed a 'Tesco exclusive' manufacturer that essentially sells everything that would previously have gone under the 'value' brand.

Yeah it seems like a bunch of the supermarkets have rebranded their economy stuff as "made-up" brands. Interested to figure out the reason for this.

That's taking a page from the discounters' book: they (mostly) only have own brands, so to keep things from becoming boring they merrily make up brands all over the place. ALDI for example has 23 listed here (https://www.aldi-sued.de/de/produkte/marken-bei-aldi-sued/ei...), but I'm not sure if that's really all...

Re: When did generic grocery brands get so good looking?

#79

Post by nneonneo »

Heh, up here in Canada the Loblaws grocery chain still sells the No Name generic brand. No Name products are about as simply presented as possible: black text on a yellow package, sometimes with a simple photo of the product. And yet they’re wildly popular (and, of course, cheap). Their website gives a pretty good indication of what their products look like: https://www.noname.ca/en_ca/

They actually experimented for a while in 2000-2008 with slightly nicer/fancier packaging, only to do a redesign in 2009 back to the simpler design. I think they might just be the brand that best epitomizes the xkcd comic (https://xkcd.com/993/), and their yellow packages probably stand out even more than white in a supermarket environment.

Re: When did generic grocery brands get so good looking?

#80

Post by jmholla »

kradeelav wrote: post #74
theamk wrote: post #16

Unrelated to actual content: if you visit the site with ad-blocker on, it does not load. Instead, you just have this icon of the eye looking at you and blinking. And the eye will just blink until you turn ad-blocker off. I know the site is called "eye on design", but the associations of user tracking via ads and this blinking eye were amusing to me. Imagine having a blinking eye in the corner of each website for each…

That's odd.. may I ask which ad-blocker you were using? I visited it with both Privacy Badger & uBlock Origin running (on FF) and it loaded for me.

I'm doing all of that, but I got a response similar to the above person, except, the eye didn't blink at me.

Correction: It just blinked at me.

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