ss wrote
MM wrote
tim..... wrote
Mr Pounder wrote

Here is the promised update.

The chicken cost a fiver, has fed 3 people and the ferking dog. Nobody
could tell the difference between the Aldi chicken and the Marks&
Sparks chicken. The dog was not questioned.

Supermarket chicken is the same wherever you buy it. All the taste is
taken out because it has been injected with water to bulk it out. To
get anything better you have to buy if from a source that doesn't do
that (and good luck!).

The chocolate ice lolly things are the same as Cadburys; or so Mrs
Pounder
has informed me.

I bet they are not. I've never bought Aldi ones, but the ones that they
sell in Iceland (which seems to source some of its own brands from the
same supplier) are definitely inferior - though still acceptable

The biscuits are indistinguishable from any other brand of biscuits.

I buy "value" biccies in Tesco. 25p a pack against 1-1.50 for the
bands.
And you can't tell the difference.

Aldi are usually cheaper than Tesco, sometimes by a lot.

Re own brand, In many instances it will be the same product as branded,
things may have changed now but many years back I worked for a major crisp
manufacturer and they made several own brands for supermarkets, all they
did was change the packaging. As explained to me if they altered the
`recipe` by the time they shut the line down cleaned it and restarted it
then got the oils heated up again for cooking then it would actually cost
more to produce and as the idea was the supermarket sold own brand cheaper
then margins were tight all round so no way are you going to make it more
expensive to produce,

Doesn't have to be done like that tho. If for example you are making
say tomato soup in cans, if you start making the expensive stuff with
the more expensive tomatoes, and then need to change over to
making the cheaper own brand tomato soup, which uses a cheaper
grade of tomatoes, all you have to do is change the tomatoes you
are putting into the system, you don't have to shut the whole line
down, clean it all out, start it up again etc. You might end up with
a little of the more expensive tomatoes in the own brand run but
no one is going to notice that or even care if they did.

same goes for a biscuit manufacturer I worked for although some
supermarkets did want their own recipes.

We know they arent all the same when we can pick them in a
double blind trial and there are a wide variety of styles to buy.

I suspect that Aldi/Lidl are not in fact own brand but possibly major
brands from other countries and we just dont recognise the brand names.

Unlikely. That's certainly not true of the basic stuff like canned tomatoes
or olive oil.