These 5 Grocery Stores Have the Cheapest Private-Label Brands

Many of us have felt the pain of spending too much money on food products. One way around this is by choosing private-label grocery store brands over the bigger brand-name products when perusing the aisles. But which grocery store chains boast the most affordable house brands? Discount code website Coupons4Real did the research to answer that question.

For their report, researchers analyzed the prices of 225,317 items across 253 subcategories of groceries. They specifically looked at meat and seafood, dairy and eggs, beverages, baked goods, and frozen produce in 173 supermarkets within 49 major U.S. cities. The researchers then created a list of 118 store-brand products and compared their prices across Aldi, Costco, Kroger, Target, and Walmart. After analyzing the list, the researchers produced a cost-by-chain ranking of the grocery stores using a zero to 100 scale, with 100 being the most expensive. 

Compared to its biggest competitors in the discount grocery chain space, Walmart came out on top as the grocery store with the most affordable store brands. The supermarket’s own-label products—Great Value, Freshness Guaranteed, Sam’s Choice, etc.—are, on average, in the cheapest 20 percent compared to the other major stores in the study. 

Aldi isn’t only known for its yearly advent calendars—it’s also second on this list of the most affordable chains for store-brand groceries. The company’s prices are among the lowest 35 percent of all store-brand items thanks to its private labels, such as Happy Farms, Season’s Choice, Kirkwood, and many others. 

Rounding out the top three is Costco, which is about 5 percent more expensive than Aldi. Famous for its bulk items, the grocery store falls into the bottom 40 percent of all the store prices in this study with its house brand Kirkland Signature. 

You can view the complete list below:

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