What’s in a No Name

My grocery shelves have been changing—and not for the better.

Pretty much since I can remember, I’ve always lived close to and shopped in a No Frills grocery store. In terms of discount supermarkets in Ontario, they were usually the cleanest and best stocked. And best of all, they have two house brands: President’s Choice and No Name. So, in one store, I could buy dirt cheap tuna fish but still lay my hands on those addictive chocolate chunk cookies that I like.

Now not every product was a winner. For some reason house brands can’t always measure up to name brands. And well, PC Cola was one of them. If I can describe it, I’d have to says it tastes like they were trying to go for somewhere around Coke, but decided to give up three-quarters of the way. It wasn’t bad, it just wasn’t my first choice.

But now it looks like whole company is in the middle of rebranding and soft drinks are going through the largest changes. The first half of their decision was to shift the drinks over to the No Name brand for some reason I can’t fathom. But what’s even worse is the “new” packaging. Take a look:

The first thing I thought of was that they could not be serious. The second was that they should have fired whoever came up with this. Now, I also say “new” because this is actually how no name products looked when they were first introduced in 1978. That’s right, to update and refresh their look, Loblaw’s (the parent company) decided the best course of action was a return to 30 years ago.

I can wrap my head around the reasoning, I think. The original intent of the No Name brand—and it just struck me how antithetical that sounds—was to emphasize value over everything else. And considering that black text on yellow with no graphics saves design time and printing cost, it’s almost a sort of anti-marketing; they produce, you buy, we all save. But I just can’t see it that way. Especially since all of their packaging now looks like that. So you have rows of identical yellow boxes, cans, jars, and bottles with the only thing to distinguish the contents are short descriptions like “saltines,” “pickles,” “apple juice.” To me, rather than seeing these products offer value, I now have an image of utilitarian food, it occupies space and contains calories and that’s all about which I should be concerned. Aren’t I glad I saved 34 cents?

Take a look at these items and ask yourself if you feel you’d be getting a good bargain by saving 5% or so.

Try again, Loblaw’s. Nobody wants to remember the seventies.