Home brands vs private labels: Which supermarket products offer value for money?

When we put a call out to our members and supporters to recommend home-brand supermarket products, like Pams or Woolworths Essentials, to investigate, we were inundated.

From frozen vegetables to baking ingredients, our members use a lot of home- or store-brand products.

One member, Barbara, told us, “If the supermarket product is cheaper, I always buy it and always find that the taste is as good as any of the fancy ones.”

This outlook is backed up by a 2024 Focus Insights report into the habits of supermarket shoppers. It found that 40% are buying more store-brand products to save money. Nearly 6 out of 10 shoppers thought the quality was about the same as private-brand products, and 69% said the quality is improving all the time.

Our members suggested far more products than we could investigate. So, we selected 12 categories of grocery items to look at, examining differences in price, ingredients and nutrition information between store brands and other brands on the shelf.

Putting our tastebuds on the line, we then taste-tested baked beans and wheat biscuits to see if we could tell the difference between the store brands and the more expensive options.

Home-brand is cheaper but sometimes quality is lacking

We bought 12 grocery items and compared the ingredients, nutrition information and prices between the store-brand product and the private labels.

We found that for some products – like wheat biscuits or bread – there’s no harm in buying the store-brand versions. The ingredients are similar, and the store brands are likely to be cheaper. But we did find instances where the store-brand quality was lacking, and that it paid to look at the label to see what you’re really getting.

In terms of cost, the store-brand products were cheaper across the board. Pams (including Pams Value) had the cheapest items for seven products, while Woolworths was the cheapest for two.

The supermarket home brands matched prices for two products: baked beans and milk were the same price at Woolworths and Pak’nSave, while cocoa was the same price at Woolworths and New World.

We also found that Pams products were generally cheaper at Pak’nSave than New World, although both supermarkets are owned by Foodstuffs. Of the 12 products we looked at, 10 were cheaper at Pak’nSave. In most cases, it was a matter for cents, but for mayonnaise the price difference was 70 cents.

We also found that quality didn’t always go hand in hand with a bargain. There was a distinct lack of corn in Pams Value corn, and the Essentials Mayonnaise from Woolworths was mediocre.

Yet, for basics like milk, bread and cheese there wasn’t a great deal of difference in ingredients, when compared to the private-label products.

When it came to our blind taste-tests, Pams Wheat Biscuits won out, while for baked beans the big brands – SPC, Heinz and Watties – were preferred over home-brand versions.

Head-to-head product comparisons

Here’s the low down on each product. All prices are per 100g.

Baked beans

We found eight brands of baked beans on the supermarket shelves. The cheapest were Woolworths and Pams Value at 25 cents. Heinz was the most expensive at 83 cents.

If you’re watching your salt content, Heinz Beanz had the most sodium (475mg) while Macro Organic Baked Beans had the least (225mg). Watties had the most sugar in the products we surveyed.

If you want more beans for your buck, Pams Baked Beans had the most at 57% – 6% more than Aotearoa favourite Watties. Pams Value had the least at 46%.

See which brand came out tops in our taste-test in “Battle of the beans”.

Cocoa powder

Our members were big fans of the store-brand baking goods. One member, Heather, said she’d “never noticed them being of lower quality” and finds them much cheaper.

Of the five brands we looked at, Woolworths was the cheapest at $1.92 and Donovans the most expensive at $2.75. All contained 100% cocoa powder.

Creamed corn

The starkest result in our comparison was for creamed corn. In short, the store brands tended to contain meagre amounts of corn: Pams Value creamed corn had just 40% corn, while Woolworths had 48%. At the other end of the scale, Watties had 80%, with Oak and Pams not far behind with 71% and 70%, respectively. Edgell’s had 58% corn and the most salt at 260mg per 100g.

The Pams Value product was the cheapest at 29 cents. Yet for 2 cents more you’d get 30% more corn with the Pams product. Edgell’s was the most expensive 78 cents. At New World, Watties was the same price as Edgell’s.

Mayonnaise

The increasing cost of oil has sent mayonnaise prices through the roof. In dismay, one of our taste-testers trialled the cheapest mayo option – Woolworths Essentials – with her family. They refused to eat it, saying the mayo was thin, bland and just yuck.

A glance at the ingredients list explains why. In Aotearoa, food labelling laws require ingredients to be listed from the biggest percentage through to the smallest. For the Essentials mayo, canola oil was fifth in the list, preceded by water, sugar, vinegar and thickeners. For the other four mayonnaises we surveyed, oil was the first ingredient.

This meant, the Essentials Mayonnaise had the least fat (5.5g) of the five mayo products we surveyed, although it also had the most sugar (21.5g). It was the cheapest at 86 cents, while Best Foods was the most expensive – between $1.53 and $1.97, depending on where you shopped. Best Foods also had the most fat (78.9g) and the least sugar (1g).

Four mayonnaise products included egg in their recipes: Best Foods, Woolworths, Eta and Pams.

Canned spaghetti

Of the six brands we looked at, the cheapest canned spaghetti was Pams Value at 24 cents at Pak’nSave.

Pams Value had more pasta compared to tomato sauce, as did Woolworths, Macro and Pams, while Watties and Oak had more tomato sauce.

Watties was the most expensive at New World (66 cents). We found it cheaper at Pak’nSave (45 cents), although it was still nearly twice the price of Pams Value Spaghetti (24 cents).

Standard (blue top) cow’s milk

Milk is milk, right? All the brands we surveyed had 100% milk.

The cheapest were the store brands while the most expensive was Anchor.

Table spread

The main difference in the six table spreads we looked at was whether the first ingredient (and hence biggest) listed was water or oil. Pams Value, Essentials and Sunrise table spreads all lead with water, followed by oil.

Both the Pams and Essentials brands contained palm oil, which can come with an environmental cost. Under current labelling laws, manufacturers don’t have to state whether products contain palm oil – it can be listed as vegetable oil. So you can’t always tell if a product contains palm oil just by looking at the label.

In terms of value for money, Pams Value was the cheapest (30 cents), with Sunrise Table Spread almost twice the price (58 cents). Meadowlea original and buttery spreads were the most expensive – between 74 cents and .90 cents, depending on the store.

The Essentials table spread had the highest sodium content at 680mg (compared to the others, which were between 340mg and 355mg).

Tasty cheese

Of the four tasty cheeses we looked at, Mainland was the most expensive at $2.00, while Pams was the cheapest at $1.12. Coming middle of the pack were Rolling Meadow ($1.65) and Woolworths ($1.36).

Tomato sauce refill

Watties tops the list for having the most tomatoes in its sauce at 81%. Woolworths is just one percent behind with 80% tomato puree. Pams contains 75% concentrated tomatoes, while Pams Value has just 30% tomato paste.

Pams and Pams Value tomato sauces were the cheapest. Pams had the most sodium and sugar, while Watties had the least sodium and Pams Value the least sugar.

Vanilla ice cream

The cheapest ice cream in our survey was Woolworths creamy vanilla at 32 cents. The most expensive was Deep South Aspiring Creamy Vanilla at $1.52.

At Pak’nSave, Tip Top Creamy Vanilla was the cheapest option available when we were shopping (34 cents), with the Pams Vanilla Bean Ice Cream twice the price (66 cents).

Wheat biscuits

Going by ingredient lists and nutrition information panels, there isn’t a big difference between the Sanitarium wheat biscuits and the two store-brands options, other than some additional vitamins and minerals.

All three brands have 97% wheat, followed by sugar, salt and barley malt extract.

Pams was the cheapest at 49 cents at Pak’nSave. However, the week we shopped Weet-bix was on special and only one cent more expensive than Pams. At its usual price, it’s 58 cents. Woolworths was the second cheapest brand at 55 cents.

We also tasted the wheat biscuits to see which brand came out tops. See what we thought in “Wheat or Weet?”.

White bread

There wasn’t a great deal of difference in the ingredients or nutrition in the four brands of white sandwich bread we surveyed. And there was just one cent difference in price between Essentials and Pams, with Pams the cheapest at Pak’nSave.

Battle of the beans taste test

Our panel of 12 taste-testers sampled eight brands of baked beans to determine which was the best. We pitted traditional favourite Watties against Pams, Pams Value and Woolworths brands, along with Heinz, Oak, Macro and SPC.

SPC came out tops, with our panel giving it 50 out of a possible 60 points. They said the product had a well-balanced flavour and a good ratio of sauce to beans.

“Not too sweet – as a bean should taste,” said one taster, while another picked up on some underlying herbs and spices.

Coming in second was Heinz Beanz with 46 points, followed by Watties on 44.

The definite loser was Macro, a Woolworths brand, certified organic baked beans. One taste-tester said the beans looked “anaemic and uninviting”, with another seven saying they looked pale. One tester declared the Macro beans were “too beany” and picked it was an organic product.

Just one of our taste-testers would buy the product again but would add more salt. The product did have the least amount of salt and sugar compared to the other beans.

The Woolworths and Pams Value beans didn’t fare much better, with only one taste-tester saying they’d buy the products again.

Wheat or weet taste test

We compared two store-brand wheat biscuits with Sanitarium Weet-bix to see which brand our blind taste-tasters preferred.

Pams Wheat Biscuits came out top, with our panel of 11 tasters scoring it 44 points out of 55. Woolworths came second with 39 points, and iconic New Zealand brand Sanitarium came third with 30 points.

One taster couldn’t tell the difference between the biscuits, while two found the Sanitarium brand a bit bland.

One tester found them all quite similar. “If I cover it in sugar I couldn’t notice a difference,” they said.

How store brands affect competition in the grocery sector

While store brands can offer a short-term win for shoppers – because they’re generally cheaper and give greater choice – there’s a risk they could come to dominate supermarket shelves and push out competitors, raising prices in the long run.

Read more about the potential problems with supermarket-branded products here.