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| Purchasing store brands is a common tactic to save money but for a super-sensitive celiac, it's quite dangerous! |
Many ideas for saving money on buying groceries will work for those who need to eat gluten-free, but that won't be true for every savings tip you hear.
Some ideas, such as buying store-brand products over major brands, work well for those who don't have to worry about a food's ingredients or how that food was processed.
But when it comes to those with celiac disease, non-celiac gluten sensitivity, or even wheat allergies, reaching for off-brand products to save money can be extremely dangerous, especially if you react to very low levels of gluten residue.
Avoiding gluten isn't as easy as just reading a label.
You cannot tell from a label alone if a particular product is free of gluten. There is detective work you must do before you can appropriately discern if a gluten-free product is safe for you or loved ones to consume.
Reading the list of ingredients and the allergy statement on the can or package is essential, but the ingredients are not the only thing you need to consider.
If you're wondering if generic, off-brand, and store-brand products are a good way to cut down on gluten-free food costs, here's what you need to know about non-premium brands to determine if a product is the best choice for you.
At one time, store brands and non-premium products were considered inferior when compared to major brands.
Store brands would sell canned mushrooms broken in pieces, while premium brands would sell whole button mushrooms for a much higher price. Store brands of green beans were irregular shapes and sizes, while premium brands were more uniform, younger, and believed to be a better choice when serving to company.
Today, store brands have pulled themselves up to compete with major brands, offering shoppers a better value.
To do this, stores had to start purchasing from reliable manufacturers, rather than going with a lower-quality product. Since there is no advertising or marketing costs associated with store-brands, private labels bring in more money for the store than premium brands do.
That makes off-branding a viable income stream.
Some brands do take advantage of larger manufacturers, giving the consumer exactly the same product as top-end brands, but stores are more likely to use one of the large number of smaller manufacturers that specialize in offering particular product lines.
One of these product lines is store brand and off-brand products.
Due to the demand for such products, smaller manufacturers can now seek out quality products they can offer to store brands almost exclusively.
In these cases, the food is not the same, but the smaller companies are sometimes owned by major corporations that also produce national brands, so the quality they look for on a worldwide basis is still good.
Quality and price must match what the store is looking for, and unfortunately, the focus of any given store probably won't be on giving its customers gluten-free food.
Some stores are large enough to own their own manufacturing facilities, allowing them to keep a closer eye on quality.
However, the packaging is where things get sticky for us.
Where premium advertised brands can be depended on for consistency, store brands cannot.
Products and vendors will be pulled from a wide variety of sources, making off brand and store brands unreliable for super-sensitive celiacs.
Generic and store labels don't reveal what manufacturing company processed and packaged the food. Ordinarily, the label will simply state who the product was distributed by.
For example, the Kirkland Signature Brand, available at Costco, simply says the food was distributed by Costco Wholesale Corp. The label includes a contact address, phone number, and says the product was made in the USA.
This cloaking isn't meant to be devious.
Companies are just not in a rush to volunteer who they are, especially since the end product might have been adapted to fit the store's needs or the recipe changed to stay within the store's budget.
Since store brands don't manufacture the products they are selling, they need the freedom to purchase directly from manufacturers or suppliers, and there can be many manufacturers or vendors involved in a store's line.
For those super-sensitive to gluten, this can be a dangerous practice because the recipe of the product won't always be the same.
It's rare that a store will purchase from a single manufacturer.
They are going to go with not only what's available, but the best deal at the time.
If a store comes across pallets of food being sold for drastically reduced prices due to some of the product being damaged during shipment, they need the freedom to be able to do that.
When I worked as a supervisor in a workshop for developmentally challenged adults, these types of orders were quite common.
We would remove the name-brand label from hundreds of cans and then relabel the products for resale by a different company.
At other times, we'd remove the product from its original brand-name packaging and repackage it with a generic or off-brand labels.
It's not going to be easy to back-track these types of purchases, especially when phone representatives are not privy to the real information and have been told to simply state the company doesn't add any gluten to the product.
On a store brand, that type of information would be useless in making an informed decision.
Today, it's even worse.
You're more likely to hear that the company cannot verify or guarantee the gluten status of their products.
This is what happened when the gluten-free labeling law went into effect in 2013.
Where the Western Family brand in Utah used to give out gluten-free lists that included the premium brand name of each of their foods, today, they are no longer willing to state that any of their foods are gluten free.
If the company cannot verify the product is safe, you're better off going with a company that can because repackaging opens the product up to additional risks.
Like major brands, small packaging companies are not going to be dedicated gluten-free facilities, so safety will depend on how that particular product line is normally handled.
Canned vegetables, fruit, tomato sauce, refried beans, and similar products might simply require the manufacturer to switch out the label in the labeling machine.
If you're buying a product that is always gluten free like plain canned fruit and vegetables, going with a dependable store brand to cut costs won't be as risky as a product like frozen broccoli that's being opened up inside the facility and then repackaged into a new store-brand plastic bag.
Packaging is always risky because the product's safety depends on not only what type of facility the food was packaged in, but also when.
If the packing is done at the same time that foods with gluten are being packaged, the gluten-free product can be easily contaminated with gluten.
This is why many Great Value foods used to have a declaration on the package about the possibility of being contaminated with wheat. This was not a cover-your-ass statement as so many celiacs wanted to believe.
I react to those frozen vegetables.
Once the labeling law went into effect and foods could contain up to 20 ppm of gluten, those warnings suddenly disappeared, which made it almost impossible to figure out which of their vegetables were risky and which ones are not.
The same thing goes for using the same equipment to package gluten products. Machines cannot be cleaned well enough to make them safe at all.
This is even more risky if workers are not functioning underneath a strict allergy protocol like several of the major brands use, where the machine is well cleaned in between runs and the first two batches are dumped.
Your safety depends on whether the employees are following that protocol on any given run.
Given the goals of producing store-brand products, this type of allergen protocol would steeply add to the overall cost of a store's products, especially if the store brand didn't have another brand waiting to purchase the first two runs from them.
Although I cannot find any information on what happens to the first two runs that premium companies don't use, I'd be extremely surprised if they actually throw any product away.
More likely, the first two runs are sold to off brands and store brands as a way to recover their losses, since store brands rarely mark their products “gluten free.”
How much of a risk you're willing to take with store-brand products is up to you, of course.
Although we each react to gluten-free products differently, keep in mind that no symptoms doesn't mean you are not having an autoimmune reaction.
It only takes a little bit of gluten to set the immune cascade in motion, so judging a product's safety by the way you react or don't react isn't always wise.
The current labeling law was put in place to benefit the food manufacturer.
It was not put there to benefit you.
That's pretty obvious with the rise of mechanically separated oats, as well as how barley and wheat starch are being added to gluten-free labeled products now.
It's best to carefully and thoroughly investigate everything for yourself and come to your own conclusions. Don't just take someone's word for it, and that includes mine.
You have to educate yourself and bring your own experience and feelings into the decision-making process. Only then can you rest assured that at the present moment, you are making the best decision for you and your family.
Related Articles:
Are You Gluten Free But Still Feel Like Crap?
How Much Gluten is in a Single Breadcrumb?
Can You Get Glutened Going to the Grocery Store?
Avoiding gluten isn't as easy as just reading a label.
You cannot tell from a label alone if a particular product is free of gluten. There is detective work you must do before you can appropriately discern if a gluten-free product is safe for you or loved ones to consume.
Reading the list of ingredients and the allergy statement on the can or package is essential, but the ingredients are not the only thing you need to consider.
If you're wondering if generic, off-brand, and store-brand products are a good way to cut down on gluten-free food costs, here's what you need to know about non-premium brands to determine if a product is the best choice for you.
Where Do Store Brands Come From?
At one time, store brands and non-premium products were considered inferior when compared to major brands.
Store brands would sell canned mushrooms broken in pieces, while premium brands would sell whole button mushrooms for a much higher price. Store brands of green beans were irregular shapes and sizes, while premium brands were more uniform, younger, and believed to be a better choice when serving to company.
Today, store brands have pulled themselves up to compete with major brands, offering shoppers a better value.
To do this, stores had to start purchasing from reliable manufacturers, rather than going with a lower-quality product. Since there is no advertising or marketing costs associated with store-brands, private labels bring in more money for the store than premium brands do.
That makes off-branding a viable income stream.
Some brands do take advantage of larger manufacturers, giving the consumer exactly the same product as top-end brands, but stores are more likely to use one of the large number of smaller manufacturers that specialize in offering particular product lines.
One of these product lines is store brand and off-brand products.
Due to the demand for such products, smaller manufacturers can now seek out quality products they can offer to store brands almost exclusively.
In these cases, the food is not the same, but the smaller companies are sometimes owned by major corporations that also produce national brands, so the quality they look for on a worldwide basis is still good.
Quality and price must match what the store is looking for, and unfortunately, the focus of any given store probably won't be on giving its customers gluten-free food.
Some stores are large enough to own their own manufacturing facilities, allowing them to keep a closer eye on quality.
However, the packaging is where things get sticky for us.
Where premium advertised brands can be depended on for consistency, store brands cannot.
Products and vendors will be pulled from a wide variety of sources, making off brand and store brands unreliable for super-sensitive celiacs.
Which Manufacturer Produced the Product?
 |
| Store brands often buy pallets of damaged goods, which can be risky for super-sensitive celiacs |
Generic and store labels don't reveal what manufacturing company processed and packaged the food. Ordinarily, the label will simply state who the product was distributed by.
For example, the Kirkland Signature Brand, available at Costco, simply says the food was distributed by Costco Wholesale Corp. The label includes a contact address, phone number, and says the product was made in the USA.
This cloaking isn't meant to be devious.
Companies are just not in a rush to volunteer who they are, especially since the end product might have been adapted to fit the store's needs or the recipe changed to stay within the store's budget.
Since store brands don't manufacture the products they are selling, they need the freedom to purchase directly from manufacturers or suppliers, and there can be many manufacturers or vendors involved in a store's line.
For those super-sensitive to gluten, this can be a dangerous practice because the recipe of the product won't always be the same.
It's rare that a store will purchase from a single manufacturer.
They are going to go with not only what's available, but the best deal at the time.
If a store comes across pallets of food being sold for drastically reduced prices due to some of the product being damaged during shipment, they need the freedom to be able to do that.
When I worked as a supervisor in a workshop for developmentally challenged adults, these types of orders were quite common.
We would remove the name-brand label from hundreds of cans and then relabel the products for resale by a different company.
At other times, we'd remove the product from its original brand-name packaging and repackage it with a generic or off-brand labels.
It's not going to be easy to back-track these types of purchases, especially when phone representatives are not privy to the real information and have been told to simply state the company doesn't add any gluten to the product.
On a store brand, that type of information would be useless in making an informed decision.
Today, it's even worse.
You're more likely to hear that the company cannot verify or guarantee the gluten status of their products.
This is what happened when the gluten-free labeling law went into effect in 2013.
Where the Western Family brand in Utah used to give out gluten-free lists that included the premium brand name of each of their foods, today, they are no longer willing to state that any of their foods are gluten free.
When was the Product Produced or Repackaged?
 |
| Purchasing store-brand packages of frozen vegetables are risky due to the way they purchased and then repackaged in non-dedicated facilities |
If the company cannot verify the product is safe, you're better off going with a company that can because repackaging opens the product up to additional risks.
Like major brands, small packaging companies are not going to be dedicated gluten-free facilities, so safety will depend on how that particular product line is normally handled.
Canned vegetables, fruit, tomato sauce, refried beans, and similar products might simply require the manufacturer to switch out the label in the labeling machine.
If you're buying a product that is always gluten free like plain canned fruit and vegetables, going with a dependable store brand to cut costs won't be as risky as a product like frozen broccoli that's being opened up inside the facility and then repackaged into a new store-brand plastic bag.
Packaging is always risky because the product's safety depends on not only what type of facility the food was packaged in, but also when.
If the packing is done at the same time that foods with gluten are being packaged, the gluten-free product can be easily contaminated with gluten.
This is why many Great Value foods used to have a declaration on the package about the possibility of being contaminated with wheat. This was not a cover-your-ass statement as so many celiacs wanted to believe.
I react to those frozen vegetables.
Once the labeling law went into effect and foods could contain up to 20 ppm of gluten, those warnings suddenly disappeared, which made it almost impossible to figure out which of their vegetables were risky and which ones are not.
The same thing goes for using the same equipment to package gluten products. Machines cannot be cleaned well enough to make them safe at all.
This is even more risky if workers are not functioning underneath a strict allergy protocol like several of the major brands use, where the machine is well cleaned in between runs and the first two batches are dumped.
Your safety depends on whether the employees are following that protocol on any given run.
Given the goals of producing store-brand products, this type of allergen protocol would steeply add to the overall cost of a store's products, especially if the store brand didn't have another brand waiting to purchase the first two runs from them.
Although I cannot find any information on what happens to the first two runs that premium companies don't use, I'd be extremely surprised if they actually throw any product away.
More likely, the first two runs are sold to off brands and store brands as a way to recover their losses, since store brands rarely mark their products “gluten free.”
Lack of Symptoms Isn't a Good Measuring Stick to Use
How much of a risk you're willing to take with store-brand products is up to you, of course.
Although we each react to gluten-free products differently, keep in mind that no symptoms doesn't mean you are not having an autoimmune reaction.
It only takes a little bit of gluten to set the immune cascade in motion, so judging a product's safety by the way you react or don't react isn't always wise.
The current labeling law was put in place to benefit the food manufacturer.
It was not put there to benefit you.
That's pretty obvious with the rise of mechanically separated oats, as well as how barley and wheat starch are being added to gluten-free labeled products now.
It's best to carefully and thoroughly investigate everything for yourself and come to your own conclusions. Don't just take someone's word for it, and that includes mine.
You have to educate yourself and bring your own experience and feelings into the decision-making process. Only then can you rest assured that at the present moment, you are making the best decision for you and your family.
Related Articles:
Are You Gluten Free But Still Feel Like Crap?
How Much Gluten is in a Single Breadcrumb?
Can You Get Glutened Going to the Grocery Store?
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