Once thought of as only fit for those on tight budgets, home brand and private labels are making their way into the trolleys of those who are more moneyed.

Helen Boot, 27, an engineer who lives in inner-city Paddington isn’t embarrassed about being a home-brand shopper.

In fact, she says the $4.50 mud cake from Coles is up there with the best of them.

“It’s really dense, delicious and I’d be happy if I got that in a restaurant,” she says.

Boot arrived from the UK in December and started buying home brands because that’s what her friends did.

“It’s easy to stick with the brands you’re introduced to,” she says.

“Back home, I used to buy whatever brands my family bought and when I arrived here I just followed what my friends bought.

“There’s no stigma around it, I feel like a lot of people here in Sydney are on more of a budget anyway, and I suppose it helps with the rent if I save a little money on groceries.”

The growing appeal of home brand and private label products is underlined by consumer-voted Product of the Year results.

Saturday Extra has had exclusive access to the results, due to be released in November, which show that of the 323 winners, 101 are home brand.

Research commissioned by Product of the Year, conducted by Nielsen, shows 85 per cent of people voted some home brands better than their branded equivalent.

And one in five shoppers stock more than half their shopping trolley with home- brand products.

More than 13,000 consumers vote for Product of the Year and director Sarah Connelly isn’t surprised that nearly one-third of winners are home brand because even she is a convert.

She has replaced about half her grocery trolley with home-brand products and estimates it saves her between $20 and $30 a week.

“Historically, people think they’re cheap and nasty but retailers are now more savvy about packaging, quality and value, so consumers are more willing to try it,” Connelly says.

“I’ve been seeing them win over the last five years. In 2010, there were one or two home-brand products and now they’re 30 per cent of the winners.”

An increasing trend among shoppers is to buy all their staple products at a cheaper, non-branded store such as Aldi, before finishing off their shopping list at the higher-end Woolworths or Coles.

This is in stark contrast to a report in 2013, that found 35 per cent of respondents believed home- brand products were only for those on tight budgets.

A separate, 2017 report by Iris Worldwide said private labels account for 18.1 per cent of all sales and they are growing 1.8 times higher than branded products.

Supermarkets are being strategic in luring shoppers away from big brands to their own version, with better-looking labels rather than plain, no-frills packaging, more choice and lower prices.

In June, Coles predicted its private-label brands will account for 40 per cent of the offering by 2023.

Coles managing director, John Durkan, says more than 50 per cent of its fresh food business is own-brand.

“If consumers are willing to buy Coles brand meat and milk and dairy products, and yoghurts and fish and fruit, and vegies with the Coles brand on them, they’re willing to buy the other part of their range,” he says.

It is a big shift in a short time. When Aldi opened its first Australian store 17 years ago, private-label products represented only 4 per cent of the market.

Aldi believes it “had a key role to play in breaking the stigma around private label in Australia, by showing customers that offering private-label products at affordable prices does not mean you need to compromise on quality,” a spokesperson says. It’s done this by collecting a slew of awards.

Last year, a $7 bottle of red from Aldi, the One Road South Australian Heathcote Shiraz 2015, won Wine of the Year at the Melbourne International Wine Competition.

In 2016, its Emporium Selection Washed Rind cheese was named Australia’s best cheese by the Dairy Industry Association.

Social researcher Mark McCrindle believes awards have given home-brand products the credibility they previously lacked and credits European and US discount supermarkets Aldi and Costco with leading the charge.

“They’ve created a brand around the product that’s not linked back to them. It’s got a different name, logo and packaging, which creates a sense of quality but for a value price,” he says.

“You get the look and feel of a real brand, so it’s not embarrassing to put it out at a party.”

A generational swing has also seen brand loyalty wane.

“Brands we’d never heard of, such as Huawei, are establishing themselves here.

“Australians have learnt to be adaptive to new brands, so there is a higher tolerance in every category,” McCrindle says.

“It used to be, mum bought Omo, so I’m going to buy that, but as new brands have come out the fact we haven’t seen it before doesn’t stop us buying it.”

But how do they stack up and what’s better?

The results are in, as a leading sydney chef puts a clutch of supermarket staples to the taste test against top food brands.

SATURDAY Extra enlisted Jimmy Richardson, head chef at The Tilbury, Woolloomooloo, to compare private labels from Coles, Woolworths and Aldi with a branded version.

The shopping list included parmesan cheese, tinned tomatoes, frozen lasagne, coffee and bacon.

Apart from one surprising outlier, Richardson picked the branded product every time.

“Maybe it’s because what I’m used to. Being a chef, I buy the best ingredients possible,” he says.

“But there’s nothing wrong with it, I grew up on home-brand stuff.”

He still buys home-brand cling film and foil, and says if you’re on a budget you should buy home-brand items for pantry staples.

“It’s hard to tell the difference with the dry stuff that has a long shelf life, so sugar, flour and tinned tomatoes,” he says.

Lasagne

Initially the McCain option, with its visible herbs, looked the best when taken out of its packet, but that changed after cooking.

“It looks horrific, very processed with cheap ingredients. The pasta sheets don’t fit the container, there’s lots of bechamel sauce and very little meat,” Richardson says.

The Woolworths home brand won this round.

“You had to take it out of the foil container to microwave it. It has the best ratio of pasta, bechamel and meat and a wee bit of presentation with the paprika on top.”

Parmesan cheese

The Woolworths one “has the standard, pre-grated parmesan smell of sweaty socks”; the Coles one was “very salty and the granules are too fine”; while Aldi’s Remano brand was “the old-school classic stuff that really does stay in the fridge for months”.

But the branded Mil Lel parmesan was the winner.

“It smells fresher, there’s a texture to the grated cheese and it tastes like a block of parmesan would,” Richardson says.

Tinned tomatoes

Italian brand Mutti was the clear winner, but the Coles option was hot on its heels.

Of Mutti, Richardson says, “It tastes like tomatoes and is slightly richer than the others. It has a blitzed texture, a good amount of juice, not very sweet or acidic. It’s what you expect of tinned tomatoes.”

However, he says the Coles option was a “standout” compared with the other home brands. “It has more texture and a good balance between sweetness and acidity.”

Short bacon

It wasn’t hard to differentiate
between branded and unbranded meat here.

With bacon, the obvious indicators of quality are colour and the inclusion of fat, because “you can tell a lot about meat by the quality of its fat”, Richardson says. The fresh bacon from Peters Meats came with its fat, which adds flavour and “looks properly cured, like a piece of charcuterie”.

Once cooked, the fat rendered and curled the bacon so the rasher was nice and crisp on the edges and “it has the texture of flesh” while other options tasted more like ham.

Coffee
Lavazza pre-ground coffee came out on top, with “a nice acidity of Arabica beans, quite a chocolatey smell and nice finish”.

It was followed by Aldi’s Organic Fair Trade coffee, which was deemed “not bad” but the major supermarket brands didn’t rate at all.