Private Label Isn't Winning on Price Anymore

Private label used to mean cheap.

A plain package, a lower price, and a promise that it would do the job well enough. That's not what private label means anymore, and treating it like it still does is how brands lose shelf space they should be able to keep. Private label sales in the U.S. reached $330 billion in 2025, a 24% unit share of the market. And yet 62% of shoppers still say they default to the branded products they know and trust. Both of those things are true at the same time, and the gap between them is where the real story lives.

What Fresh Milk Taught Me About Private Label

I've watched this play out across nearly every category I've worked in. At Borden, we were selling fresh fluid milk, about as commodity as a product gets. Consumers could walk down the dairy case and swap our branded jug for the store's own version without blinking, in many cases a version we produced ourselves under contract. There was no packaging trick or size change that fixed that. We had to find real reasons for a shopper to choose the Borden name over the one sitting right next to it.

Renovation Is Not Innovation

The mistake I see brands make, then and now, is leaning too heavily on renovation rather than innovation. A new flavor extension, a graphic refresh, a more convenient size: those are renovations, and they have a place, but they're not enough on their own. The brands that actually protected their space were doing something harder. New packaging technology that kept a product fresher longer. Processing changes that improved taste, not just shelf life. Products built around a need shoppers hadn't fully named yet. That's innovation, and it's what makes a private label alternative a much harder sell.

The Pattern That Held Across Every Brand

The pattern held across every brand I've worked on: Borden, Mission Foods, International Delight, Marie's Dips and Dressings, and the growth-stage brands I partner with today. The through-line was never the tactic. It was staying close enough to the consumer to know exactly who she was, what she'd give the brand permission to do, and what she still needed that nobody had solved for her yet. A pipeline of innovation that ran two or three ideas ahead, not just the next one. That's what made it harder for private label to compete on price alone, because price was rarely the actual fight.

The Nuance Worth Sitting With

Private label is always a threat, and it gets sharper every time the economy tightens. But the brands that lose real ground to it are the ones without a foundation underneath them: no clear value proposition, no distinct point of view, nothing that separates their story from the next brand on the shelf. Communicating what makes a product different only works when it's rooted in something true about the person buying it, the human truth, not just a catchy line or jingle. It doesn't have to be complicated. It just has to be believable.

What Shoppers Are Actually Looking For

Most of the shoppers buying what my clients sell are juggling a job, a family, and a list of things that have to get done before the day is over. What they're looking for is a product that makes one part of that easier, not one more thing to think hard about. The brands that earn a permanent spot on someone’s list and eventually in someone's cart are the ones that carve out a specific job to do and then own it completely.

Private Label Has Closed the Gap

There's a piece of this that doesn't get said enough. Private label has closed that gap in a lot of categories. I have a personal care item in my own house that we buy in a private label version exclusively, and it's not because of the price. It's because the product itself is genuinely better than the name brand we used to buy. Retailers are putting real investment into their own labels now: new forms, new flavors, functionality that didn't exist in that aisle five years ago. If a brand isn't pushing forward, its private label competitor is.

The Real Threat Isn't the Logo Next to Yours

The real threat is what happens when a brand stops doing the work that earned its shelf space in the first place, long before private label ever shows up as competition. Coasting on last year's packaging refresh, last year's line extension, last year's story, while the store brand one space over keeps building something genuinely better. That's a slower, quieter loss than losing a buyer meeting, and it's much harder to reverse once shoppers have already made the switch and found they don't miss the name brand at all.

Where in your portfolio have you been renovating lately when the moment actually called for innovation?

PS. Borden's 19.5% sales growth on a $1.3 billion portfolio and Mission Foods' 18% growth in a flat, declining category didn't come from a new label design. They came from building something private label couldn't copy.