"brand names" news and stories

It's been a long time since store brands were relegated to the bottom shelf of the grocery store, saddled with those generic black-and-white labels ("Ketchup," "Pickles") that made them look like provisions in a Soviet commissary.

Still, despite fancier labels, a lot of shoppers are leery of anything that doesn't sport a name brand. "That's just plain silly," your penny-pinching grandmother might have said. "You're just paying for the name."

According to the findings of a recent study by Consumer Reports, it turns out that she might have been right.

The consumer watchdog that's better known for road testing cars and troubleshooting cell phones has turned its attention to the grocery store. The group had tasters sample 21 different food products and compare national brands with their store-brand equivalents.

The results?

AOL Money & Finance has a feature on the origin of some famous brands named after people. Here are some of the ones that I found particularly interesting:

• Arby's stands for R.B., the initials of the Raffel Brothers. Many people think it stands for roast beef.
• Taco Bell was founded by Glen Bell. I thought they just liked the bell logo. Who knew?
• Baskin-Robbins was a combination of two ice cream stores, one started by Irvine Robbins and the other by Burton Baskin. This one shouldn't have surprised me, but it did.
• Wendy's was named after Dave Thomas' (the founder) daughter's nick name. He had 5 kids. You have to wonder what the other ones thought of his choice.

Check out the rest of the 39 brands for more interesting facts.

The Cornucopia Institute (CI) has recently completed a survey of organic milks, evaluating the methods of production and "rating the integrity" of various producers of organic milk and dairy products. Predictably, the companies which received the lowest scores are the largest ones. Their study is designed to reveal the "best" organically produced dairy and the worst - which it deems to be no better than conventionally produced dairy. Fortunately for consumers, CI says that the vast majority of all branded organic dairy products are produced at farms that follow legal and ethical standards.

The rating system had categories which ranged from "outstanding" down to "brand name", which in and of itself should tell you something about the bias inherent in the survey. Just like the article over at the Slate, there seems to be no distinction made between organic and small farm, family owned, self sustaining agriculture. CI says "organic consumers tend to want to know where their food is coming from and how it is produced," but the reality is that for most organic consumers it is sufficient to know that the product has been certified organic; consumers wishing to avoid GMO products and hormones in their milk do not necessarily care what farm the cows came from. It is possible that the CI is correct and that people should care, but at the moment that is not always the case.

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