Unbranded grocery stores

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Assumptions: Food is a necessity. Without food, human beings can't live. Most people do not have easy access to farmer's markets or community shared agriculture schemes. Most North Americans shop in supermarkets.

Observations: It's impossible to look anywhere in a grocery store without seeing invasive brand messages. Okay, that last sentence was a tiny exaggeration. The ceiling is almost always free of brand messages and in most cases, so is the floor. The remainder, on the other hand, is generally quite thoroughly visually cluttered.

Solution: There needs to be a completely unbranded grocery store. I don't mean that there needs to be a store that sells only their own brand of food. I mean packaged goods in the unbranded store need to be blank except for the name of the food, the country of provenance, the nutritional information and the ingredients.

Think: Many of the necessary foods can already be found brand-free. Vegetables and fruits, more often than not, aren't branded (although there seems to be a trend towards branding them). Some stores have bulk sections which allow for the purchase of ingredients like flour that aren't branded.

Implementation: The unbranded grocery store needs to take advantage of the existing private label infrastructure. In the same way that Loblaw has food sold under its own name, the unbranded grocery store can implement a private label brand. The only difference is that this brand isn't a brand. It is instead the complete absence of a brand. Of course, it also makes a kind of good business sense to stock a store entirely with private label products. Margins are higher on private label than on national brands and prices can be lower.

Of course, the store would be a promotional disaster. Many consumers take comfort in familiar brands. A store that offered a reprieve from visual noise might not be widely welcomed, even if the prices were lower. But, just at this moment, having grown tired of too much visual clutter in supermarkets, I'd jump at the chance to shop at an unbranded grocery store.

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When comparing food labels on store and name brand foods, ingredients, nutritional value, quality and taste are often the same. Name brands are more expensive due to the marketing, advertising, and packaging costs being passed on to the customer. We are easily manipulated into believing that the name brands are more desirable, when in fact once the packaging is removed, most people can not tell the difference between brands. For example, Dr. Tom Robinson from Stanford University performed a study on preschoolers, giving them identical samples of McDonald's foods in name-brand or unmarked wrappers.

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