Tuesday, May 29, 2012

Food Lion Brand: Beans'n'Roaches

You can't walk into one without noticing: Food Lion stores are really pushing the store brand these days.

Name-brand items, even the big sellers every convenience store stocks, are disappearing from the shelves for weeks at a time, to make room for more store-brand competitors.

Prices on name-brand items may be more than double what they were five years ago; if you remember what you paid for something five years ago, and you can find that price in a Food Lion store now, it's on a store brand.

And you're unlikely to get through the store without hearing that smirky recorded voice announcing the non-news that Food Lion has re-branded its store brand "My Essentials." The first time you might not have guessed; now, what you're actually being reminded of is how Orwellian a name "My Essentials" is, for products you've not been buying...and probably don't want to try.

Earlier this spring, the store even got desperate to print out a coupon at the cash register for a substantial discount on a purchase of any store-brand products, if people would only buy $10 worth. Discontinued flavors of cat food made up most of my purchase, and the cats survived. But I did try a few store-brand food products. Canned beans. How far wrong can you go with canned beans? They were boiled at the factory, and you boil them again to eat them. I figured canned beans ought to be safe. And I ate a few cans of Food Lion's store-brand beans. And I survived. I had a few episodes of mild diarrhea, but nothing serious.

Until today. I opened the last can of Food Lion beans, dumped it into a saucepan, put on the lid, put the label in the stove where I always put wasted paper, tossed the tin out for the possum to clean before it's hauled off for recycling, did a few other little kitchen chores while waiting for steam to lift the lid off the saucepan, and finally served myself a big bowl of canned beans. I even ate a few bites.

Then I saw something in the bowl that looked like a burned bean. I scooped it out. It was not and had never been a bean. It was a very large, very dead American Cockroach.

Right. This is a separate issue from Food Lion's active discrimination against introverts, which I plan to write about later. This is not, however, a separate issue from the fact that, while trying to spend $10 on discounted Food Lion products, I did in fact consider buying salted peanuts, and I inspected six separate cans. I don't eat food before paying for it, in a supermarket, but because aflatoxin is so rampant these days I do look and sniff to make sure that a can of peanuts contains a reasonable number of edible peanuts in addition to the nasty ones that will always have to be thrown out. So I looked and sniffed, and I was definitely not tempted to taste. Every single can of store-brand peanuts smelled as if it contained more foul than edible nuts.

Are store brands always inferior merchandise? Not always. Older people in Washington probably remember a time when Giant stores actually marketed better baked goods. This was possible because most Giant stores had their own bakeries, so their baked goods were always fresher than the name-brand, packaged competitors. Also, back then, Giant stores were actively operated by members of a local family who ate their own name-brand food and served it to their friends, so they demanded that the kitchen be clean and the ingredients be as specified on the label.

And there are even situations where, conceivably, even the Food Lion brand might be preferable to a name-brand product, for murky, quirky, outlier-type reasons you might not want to know about. In the 1990s I worked briefly at a potato-chip factory in Bristol (it no longer exists). I didn't find anything marketable as an undercover report, but I did learn that the factory was routinely packaging the first batch of chips, fried in the freshest grease, for Food Lion. Market testing had determined that the loyal name-brand customers were used to the chips fried in the second through fifth batch, when the grease was less fresh and contained more trans fats...and had the flavor the customers recognized. So you could say that the store brand was better. Of course, you could also understand why (a) the factory is no longer in business, and (b) even when free chips were part of my employee benefits, I've never been really keen on chips.

However, these are exceptions. As a general rule, when a manufacturer markets some products under the brand that's been heavily and expensively advertised, and releases other products as generic or store-brand items, the generic and store-brand items are going to be noticeably second-rate in some way.

Maybe, as a thrifty shopper, you don't really mind this. Maybe the second-rate product is perfectly acceptable. Maybe you can't tell a real difference--by and large, a bean is a bean. Maybe you like fabrics with a lower thread count (lighter in hot weather) or ice cream with a lower butterfat content (it has enough butterfat anyway).

But even store-brand products shouldn't contain drowned cockroaches...or more stale peanuts than edible peanuts...or bits of string, or thumbtacks, or other oddments I have found floating about in store-brand canned goods. Store-brand products shouldn't even contain a few peas or corn kernels in a can that's labelled as containing only beans.

Unless unadvertised non-food items, including vermin, in your food are part of your essential daily diet plan, I propose that you interpret Food Lion's smarmy new name for its products thusly: "MY ESSENTIAL shopping rule is NEVER to buy Food Lion store brands."

No comments:

Post a Comment