more stuff to read 2

[ProblemAgain]

The Mystery of Groceries: Do All Brands Come From the Same Place?

By Rich Smith | More Articles | Save For Later
April 20, 2013 | Comments (9)

Ruffles, or Lays? Life Cereal, or Cap'n Crunch? SoBe Lifewater, or Aquafina?

When you visit the grocery store with those choices on your mind, you may think you're choosing among different brands, but in fact, you're just choosing between various flavors of gigantic snacks and drinks maker PepsiCo  (NYSE: PEP  ) .

Pepsi, you see, owns all these brands. Just like Kraft  (NASDAQ: KRFT  )  owns both Oscar Mayer and Polly O. Like Johnson & Johnson  (NYSE: JNJ  )  owns Lubriderm and Aveeno, Coca-Cola  (NYSE: KO  )  owns Coke and Dasani, and Procter & Gamble  (NYSE: PG  )  owns Dawn, Downy ... and Iams dog food.

Fact is, out of the dozens -- scores, hundreds -- of brands you browse every day in the grocery store, the vast majority of them are owned by just 10 multinational megaconglomerates, as laid out in this graphic from the folks at NaturalNewsBuzz:

Source: imgur.com.

These include the five companies I named, plus Nestle, General Mills, Kellogg, Mars, and Unilever besides.

If you can't beat 'em, buy 'em
How is it that these 10 companies control so much of what we eat, drink, and wash up with after eating and drinking? In some cases, they did it through sheer, unadulterated, purely American genius -- inventing great products to improve people's lives, marketing them brilliantly, and reaping the rewards.

Johnson & Johnson, for example, invented the Band-Aid bandage back in 1920 and has been patching up boo-boos and ouchies with it ever since. Coca-Cola, whose history dates to a Confederate Army officer and amateur confectioner back in the mid-1800s, was a company literally built up around the name of its signature product.

More frequently, though, as time has gone by, these companies have acquired their brands by buying up the companies built by more creative people -- such as when bleach behemoth Clorox (NYSE: CLX  ) spent $925 million to acquire up-and-comer natural-lip-balm maker Burt's Bees in 2007. Or when ConAgra shelled out nearly $5 billion to acquire private-label foodmaker Ralcorp earlier this year.

Necessity is the mother of acquisition
Why do these companies buy competing brands rather than just building a better mousetrap of their own? Here's why.

When you're already a big business, like Coke, which sells $48 billion worth of carbonated sugar water (and corollary brands) annually, it's awful hard to get customers to drink more of your product, year after year, and thus keep those profits growing at the 9% annually or so that Wall Street demands. (If you're PepsiCo, already at $65.5 billion in annual sales, it's even harder.)

Sure, you can try to grow sales by inventing other, newer, and better products to improve customers' lives -- but that's hard work, and no sure thing at all. (Cough, "New Coke," cough-cough, "Crystal Pepsi.")

Often, if you want to keep sales and profits growing, the better and surer bet is to just go out and buy a known, good thing, rather than sink millions of dollars into trying to invent a better thing.

That's what these companies have done, therefore. That's what they're still doing. And that's why. the next time you head to the grocery store, no matter how much you buy, chances are good that your shopping dollars will all wind up in the bank accounts of only 10 companies.

[Lifesighs]

I do my best not to buy things in packages or cans can't get away from it completely and still I'll bet one of the conglomerates own the oranges or bananas or grapes. I can't get away from buying dish soap and laundry detergent.

I wish everything were still the mom & pop stores.

[Wayne Goodwin]

Very interesting and true ...

[Wayne Goodwin]

I also believe all these Company's make the store brand foods as the name brand foods , Sure do taste the same ...I used to buy Tide . Now i just buy the Ultra brand half the price or less , works for me . If i need to buy something for the Headache i like the Excedrin brand but buy the store brand that has same ingredients .

[blithe spirit]

Coca-Cola has a big plant in the little town where I live...used to be an orange juice processing plant but after a series of freezes they moved their orange processing to Brazil. Anyway, they now bottle Dasani water there. They use the water from the town water system and bottle it up. So you can buy our water for about a dollar a bottle anywhere across the country.

[frenchy]

yeah a lot of people get hooked on the brand name thing and sometimes the brand name is better or maybe more consistent but frequently when you buy a store brand if you can do your homework and find out ( often times tho they make it really hard to get the 411 ) but if you do you'll find that the major brands are the ones that are makin the store brands too . so you'll buy albertsons this or the name brand of that and its the exact same thing .. so i'll buy the store brand and unless i really don't like it or the price is about the same , why not ?? some things you just might prefer the name brand .. but just as often as not . you won't .. and when you look at the price ? you definitely won't .. usually anyway .. every now and then the store brand ain't all that much less .. but when it comes to food pat is right .. if you knew what you were eatin most of the time you wouldn't be so hungry .. lately i've been tryin to eat more stuff that comes from the produce market .. anything in a box or a can is pretty much off limits cept for a few cans of somethin in case of a hurricaine .. but even that really ain't as big a problem as you'd think .. if you put a bunch of old ricotta cheese containers in your fridge filled with water before the storm gets there you have all these big blocks of ice in there so most of your food will last in the freezer for at least 5 to 7 days if you don't keep openin and closin the door .. 

[Shadowman]

Odd, people complain about $3.50/gallon gasoline but $8/gallon water that they could get for free does not register with them.

[ProblemAgain]

you didn't need the comma....

[frenchy]

yeah thats by design tho chief , when you go to pizza hut or taco bell or kfc and order a coke you know what you get?? a pepsi thats what .. not that they dont make money on the tacos and chicken and pizza too.. they do .. but they sell soda by the boatload .. and every soda in them fast food joints be it coke or orange or whatever .. its a pepsi owned soda .   

[dwalt]

I usually buy name bands. I just don't have good luck with store brands.  I try to have a coupon and I really watch for sales and stock up but like I say, store brands are just not quite as good here as the name ones.