Mercadona and La Sirena: own-label products are no longer cheap

Hacendado, La Sirena and the silent war of own-label products

Own-label products are no longer the second-choice option. The store brand — the one that pays no advertising and lives glued to the shelf — now competes head to head with manufacturers in categories where that was unthinkable a decade ago: frozen foods, ready meals, pastries. The result is a market where price is no longer the only selling point and where the line between who makes and who sells has become blurred. Casa Tarradellas illustrates this: it signs its own pizza and at the same time makes the one sold under the supermarket's name. Same kitchen, two labels, two prices.

Why store brands no longer rely on price alone

A private-label manufacturer doesn't just compete against its rivals. It competes against a retailer that decides which shelf each product goes on, at what height and with what promotion. That asymmetry turns certain products — a roast rib, a lemonade, some calamari — into fruta phenomena within the range itself. Some argue that store brands have reached the quality of manufacturer brands and that the price difference is now almost all margin; against that stands the argument that the manufacturer keeps control over the recipe and traceability. What nobody disputes is who's in charge: the range is decided at head office, not in the store.

The products that disappear without explanation

Catalogues shift, and not always for reasons the customer can read. Chocolate brownies withdrawn, a store-brand yogurt and honey ice cream that vanished overnight some twenty-five years ago, a recipe that stops being made and never comes back. Range rotation is the least visible side of the business: the consumer finds out about the delisting when something else already fills the gap. Add to that the awkward question — is there anything without sugar? — and uneven availability between countries, with products that appear in Portuguese stores but not Spanish ones, or the other way around.

With this pressure on the shelf, the likely outcome is that store brands keep chipping away at market share wherever the manufacturer can't defend the recipe. But don't count it as settled: loyalty to a specific product — the kind that makes someone notice the same pizza in two different countries — is an asset that never appears in the offers leaflet.