Brands vs private label: overview
- Private label is expanding into premium and functional food categories
- Brands increasingly use emotional connections to differentiate from competitors
- Rituals and sensory experiences can strengthen consumer loyalty beyond taste
- MMR argues private label remains associated primarily with utility
- Brands may retain advantages through distinctive product experiences
Private label is posing a threat to brands on almost every level. It long ago shed its image as the ‘lesser’ option. Since then, it has begun to premiumise, and is even now delving into the world of functional foods.
Is there any arena in which brands can still be top dog?
There is one, suggests Andy Wardlaw, chief ideas officer at market research company MMR Research: feelings.
The onward march of private label
The success of private label has been almost all-encompassing.
The global private label packaged food market was worth around $439bn (€382bn) as of 2025, according to market research platform Grand View Research, and is expected to be worth $693.1bn (€603.5bn) in 2033.
As such, brands are scrambling for a way to make themselves stand out as private label encroaches into more and more of food’s territories.
“Brands are at a reckoning point,” says Wardlaw. For many brands, it’s extremely difficult for them to acquire consumer preference.
By contrast, he explains, a lot of MMR’s own clients are using private label as a benchmark, seeing it as “the one to beat”.
Brands began developing functional foods as a new reason for consumers to engage, he suggests. Yet even in the functional space, private label is competing, and Wardlaw believes it will eventually win the battle.
Emotional resonance
While private label is premiumising and associating itself with quality, Wardlaw suggests it is still valued more for its utility than brands are.
“When people buy private label, it’s much more a job to be done.”
Yet there are two aspects of reward: immediate sensory satisfaction and longer-lasting emotional resonance. It is the second of the two that brands should focus on, Wardlaw suggests.
Often, the experience around a product means more to consumers than simply its taste, says Wardlaw. Espresso, for example, is meaningful because of the ritual surrounding it and the cultural associations with it as much as because of the drink itself. If this drink were introduced today, he suggests, it would “not pass the sip test”.
Building an emotional connection to food is even more important in the age of GLP-1s, says Wardlaw, with a food’s taste and texture often holding less importance to the drug’s users than to other consumers.
Brands need to tap into such emotional resonance to succeed, engineering experiences rather than simply texture and taste.
If this works for brands, what’s to stop private label from simply leaning into this strategy as well?
Private label products are often “clouded by associations” with the retailer that produces them, Wardlaw says, while brands are free of this. Consumers may still connect a supermarket retailer to value or convenience, while a brand is not tied to this: it is “unfettered” by connection to the retailer.
The emotional resonance that a brand has is often linked to sensory aspects beyond taste and texture.
Sensory theatre
To develop an emotional connection to their product among consumers, brands should focus on the entire product experience, suggests Phiala Mehring, sensory experience director at MMR Research.
The creation of “sensory drama” and “sensory theatre” can add a lot to a category that taste and texture cannot, she says.
The sound of a Pringles can opening, for example, or of Rice Krispies popping in milk, can compose a part of what a product means to consumers.
One of the most powerful ways for brands to build a connection between product and consumer is to “engineer an experience around the moment of consumption”, says Wardlaw. “A lot of the power of product experiences can happen before the first mouthful.”
In research conducted by MMR, in which consumers were guided by AI through the process of eating a product, 64% of what they mentioned came before the first bite.
“If you don’t give space to all those moments before that first bite, you’re potentially missing half of the story of the product”, says Natalia Chrusny, global innovation director at MMR Research.
When developing products, brands should take advantage of the consumer’s full product experience, she suggests.
Can brands build a product journey from scratch?
Many of the brands and products that utilise this full product journey – espresso, for example, or brands like Pringles and Rice Krispies – are well established. Nostalgia and ritual play a role in their staying power.
But what happens when a product is new? Can brands build this kind of appeal from scratch?
Wardlaw believes they can. He gives the example of Tony’s Chocolonely, a chocolate company that was founded in 2005.
“It did create this staged packaging. You open it up and you discover about the brand. Then there is its foil, and people start to run their hands over it.”
Many consumers, particularly among Gen Z, have appreciated this element of Tony’s Chocolonely’s presentation, according to MMR.
Can brands beat private label?
With private label going from strength to strength, it is posing a clear, sizeable and profound challenge to brands.
Succeeding in areas like premiumisation, which was once the remit of brands, it has been able to hold its own against established competition.
Yet the utilisation of the emotional resonance and sensory experience of products is one area, MMR believes, in which brands can still have an edge.
