One of the best strategies for saving money at the grocery store is to buy the store-brand version of common items such as ketchup and trash bags. The catch with such a strategy, of course, is that it’s often hard to know whether that less expensive store-brand product is really as good as the name brand. The name-brand product is a known quantity. You’ve heard of it. You’ve seen it in people’s houses. You’ve probably used it yourself. Often, the store brand is an unknown, and it’s hard to decide whether it’s worth it to buy an unfamiliar product.
An effective way to get around this problem is to shop at a store with a highly trusted store brand and simply buy products from that store brand across the board. This saves you money and likely ensures that the products in your home are sure to have a certain level of quality.
Here are four different store brands that are highly regarded. If you shop at these stores, you can use their store brand with confidence.
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Kirkland Signature. This store brand is at Costco and has long been considered one of the best store brands around. In fact, Bon Appetit identifies Kirkland Signature as “the best store brand there ever was,” which is incredibly high praise.
Kirkland Signature stands out from the pack because virtually all of the products that bear the Kirkland Signature name are at least comparable with name-brand products of the same type, with Kirkland Signature often comparing quite favorably. If you’re a Costco member, simply buying Kirkland Signature items is a straightforward way to shop and get quality products at a good price.
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Trader Joe’s. This grocery store brand sets a high standard for quality among all product lines and delves into some less common types of foods and household products. The big challenge with Trader Joe’s is that its namesake brand tends to be a bit pricier and closer to the cost of name brands on average.
Simple Truth. The store brand at Kroger has performed the best in store-brand comparisons among new products in StoreBrands’ 2018 Best New Products comparison in its May 2018 issue, as the Kroger store brand showed up again and again in numerous categories.
Kroger has been making a strong push to develop a good store brand and its Simple Truth products show the results of that push. While there aren’t Simple Truth versions of every product you might want, if you can find a Simple Truth item on the shelf at Kroger, it almost always compares favorably to a similar name brand and will save you money.
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Wegmans Brand. A big contributor to the reason for Wegmans appearing on this list is that the entire shopping experience is a good one, from the quality of the produce to the selection in the store to the friendliness and availability of the staff. But the store brand is an additional reason why this supermarket chain scores highly.
Wegmans’ store brand falls into the same class that Trader Joe’s does: They’re both high-quality store brands in terms of the products they offer, but the prices aren’t as low as those from store brands at other grocers. The advantage of Wegmans, in particular, is that the other goods and services, such as the produce and meat section, are top-notch.
Sticking with these four store brands will not only save you money, it’ll also ensure that you have items that are up to the task in your cupboards and your pantry.
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4 Store Brands That Provide High Quality at a Great Price originally appeared on usnews.com
