Canadian Politics Today

http://money.cnn.com/2018/05/21/news/companies/campbell-soup-general-mills-hershey-pepsi/index.html

Large consumer goods brands lost market share to small competitors from 2011 to 2016 for the first time in 50 years, according to Jim Brennan, a senior partner at Boston Consulting Group.

We should have seen this coming when the small brand Republican and Democrats broke through in 2016.

The existence of these "private label" brands isn't new.  We've had the "no name" yellow-label products at Superstore/Loblaws forever, and "President's Choice", and equivalents at other chains. What makes this suddenly a factor?

You mean why have they 'grown' ?  Because people aren't inundated by TV ads anymore to think that Tide is better than Kirkland.  It's not by the way.

This sounds like something I was talking about in this thread:
https://canadianpoliticalevents.createaforum.com/general-discussion/bargain-culture/?message=12449

"The Amazon Effect" is a great leveler for smaller brands or new brands because it puts your product on the shelf right next to big name competitors, and they provide the shipping and logistics and promotion.

But I am not sure how many people do their grocery shopping on Amazon.

 -k

I stayed in a town in Michigan that only had a Wal Mart.  I have never been in a Wal Mart.

  The lesbianic wheat squares breakfast cereal and so on. In most cases there's not much difference.  Especially when it comes to products that just don't require a whole lot of thought. I often buy canned mushrooms...  I don't think anybody can tell the difference between "no name" and "Money's" canned mushrooms.  You can't screw up the recipe for mushrooms.  Lots of other goods are similar. Rice, pasta, butter...

I am glad to buy it.  I have heard people say that you can't serve that stuff for company however I do.

Campbell's is one of the brands mentioned in your article, but IMO they're one of the examples where it's worth paying the extra. 

Oddly, I ALSO buy Campbells along with Wheat Squares.

I generally steer clear myself... there are occasions when I need a number of things and I'm in the area and it's just more convenient to get everything in one stop.  We could start a "Walmart Culture" thread for trashy videos about trashy things going on in Walmart.
 

Never been in a Wal Mart.  The system is a giant anti-trust machine.  You can buy better food cheaper and that has been happening and will continue to happen.

i just want to eat good stuff cheaply. 

Walmart "Great Value" store brand i generally steer clear of as it's very low quality unless it's something very hard to screw up, you'd think they'd market-test this stuff more before sending it out a gazillion stores worldwide.  PC brand obviously has always been very good quality.

Where?  I go to No Frills and Dollarama and find similar prices, but not much any other place.

Sorry - I wasn't thinking about the sentence structure.  My comment about 'you can get it cheaper' referred to stores like Loblaws, who conspire with manufacturers to bilk you, not Wal Mart.

I love NF and Dollarama.

NF = Loblaws

NF is cheaper Loblaws

I wouldn’t be caught dead in a Walmart or a dollar store.

I buy organic fruits and veggies.

I only eat meat from local, ethical sources. 

My coffee comes from a local organic roaster.

I catch my own fish. 

Life is too short to eat shitty food and animals deserve to be treated without cruelty.

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A drop in market share is not “failing”.  The title of this thread is hyperbolic.

I am lucky enough to have a family run farm about a 20 minute drive from my house. The first time I stopped in there I came away with a couple of their free range chickens. I paid a little more than the grocery store but what a treat. When you brought it from the oven and sliced it, the skin was paper thin and crackly and the steam poured out filling the dining room with a lovely aroma, and what flavor! I go there often.  But I can't speak about that without relaying a story from years ago. A work buddy of mine and I were heading back to our hometown after a weeks work at King City. North on the 400 hwy. takes you across the Holland Marsh. I said "hey let's stop in here and see what they've got" He agreed so we took the off ramp and roamed around and finally stopped at one farm and shopped. We had lovely carrots, potatoes, beets, various vegetables. When we went to pay the farmer took us into his office which was essentially a desk, chair, and a cash register in a cubby hole which was part of his barn. There were ducks wandering around. As he was toting up my bill I inquired as to whether he sold ducks as well. Yes he said I do. So I said OK can I have one and tack that on the bill. "Of course" he replied. I expected him to go to the large chest freezer that was nearby and pull out a frozen duck. But nope. He got up from his chair, grabbed one of those ducks, took it over to a large block of wood, and chopped it's head off. Then he put it in some hot water, pulled the feathers off it, bagged it and added I think it was 5 bucks on the bill. Well we got back on the highway heading north and Ron couldn't contain himself..."You are a duck murderer" "You conspired in the killing of an innocent duck" "I'm telling everybody at the hangar next week how uncaring you are toward ducks" He had fun, I put the pedal to the metal, and enjoyed a duck dinner on Saturday night.       

It's a god damned travesty that those things come at a premium when they should be the standard practice.

Economics. Learn something about it. Organic farming is lower productivity which increases costs. Those costs have to be born by the consumer. The exact premium depends on the food.

https://allianceforscience.cornell.edu/blog/2017/11/organic-farming-can-feed-the-world-until-you-read-the-small-print/

But the Mueller et al. paper carries another potentially even more fatal flaw, one that the authors do not sufficiently address. Most of the literature on which their model is based assumes the continued existence of what I call laundered nitrogen, which seriously biases existing assessments of organic vs. conventional crop yield gaps.

This happens because the vast majority of existing organic crops depend on imported nitrogen laundered from animal manures. This nitrogen is ultimately derived from artificial fertilizers used to grow crops to feed the animals on conventional farms. In a worldwide organic scenario envisioned by the researchers, this would not be possible, so the nitrogen scarcity would be critical.

This would lead to worldwide famine. In one of the few attempts to quantify this impact properly, Vaclav Smil concluded that only about half the current world population can be supported without the Haber-Bosch process for artificial nitrogen fixation. Mueller et al. do show a substantial nitrogen deficit for a 100 percent organic planet, but argue that this is a good thing because it reduces greenhouse gases and pollution of water systems.