I grew up in Atlanta. One of my favorite summer family memories is piling into the car and heading to the Lane Orchards for the day. I would get the chance to stuff myself with peach ice cream and my mother would buy many many cheap overripe peaches and take them home to freeze so we could have peach cobbler all year long. Thanks for bringing back sweet memories!
This is no secret. Working with manufacturers enables the company to get better prices and sometimes bigger packages. It also allows TJs to have companies produce products to their standards (ex: no chemical preservatives or artificial colors). And yes, of course no middleman/wholesaler.
Oh man... it won't be peach season in New York for months. I'm may have to plan a peach field trip to the deep south next year...
Can any Serious Eater give a primer on some of these varieties? This Yankee, regrettably, wouldn't know a Lane Luck from a Candy Mac or a Fireprince from a White Lady.
It's no secret that TJs sells private label items made by other companies. They happen to have a high quality standard to match the more reasonable price point. Unlike most shops doing this and placing them alongside brand names, they'll only carry limited varieties of an item. If you want a taste of this on a more budget level, check out ALDI. Yes, the place where you have to pay 25c deposit to use a shopping cart. They're about the most fantastic low end supermarket ever. No frills, mostly private label, and unbeatable prices. Same great satisfaction guarantee as TJs. I miss their $1.69 monster box of Frosted Mini Wheats dearly. And guess what - ALDI owns TJs.
This is idiotic. The packaging is usually an obvious tip-off of what product the TJ brand is a twin of - I'm pretty sure they do that on purpose.
Glad to hear they are a tough customer on quality control - thx jfultz.
Simple: Regular Distribution is manufacturer (x% margin)->distributor (30% margin)->Retailer (30-40%Margin). Trader Joes has huge volumes so it goes like this Manufacturer (lower margin than usual)-> Trader Joes. They cut out 30-50% of the margin. Hopefully that helps understand why they contract manufacture.
BREAKING NEWS - Ralph's, Von's, Costco, Safeway all found to be using third parties to produce store brand name items!!!
/sigh
@heidia: No apology necessary. Not such a big deal. Just expressing my confusion and displeasure with all the daggers thrown at TJ's recently.
@Susquehanna - I didn't mean to make TJ sound unethical--sorry if my comment left that impression. TJ is just known to be tough negotiators with manufacturers on price and quality.
I'm confused. Why is this scandalous? Are there people out there who think that stores actually manufacturer and/or package the products they sell under their own label? Seriously? Wow. I honestly thought that everyone (literally) knew that "private label" products were produced by the same companies who make the name-brand stuff. Maybe I'm misunderstanding the issue that makes this so scandalous?
The real problem with TJs is their MO of getting customers hooked on a brand-name product, then reinventing it as a private label product. That wouldn't be so bad, except the price usually does not go down after private labeling (as one might expect), while the product size usually does decrease, so you actually end up paying more per unit than you did when it was name-brand. Also, they like to reformulate, often resulting in a version inferior to the one you got hooked on in the first place.
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