Many grocery stores have products marked whit there private brands. The information
about these brands is poor. We wanted to find out what the stores own brands stand for
and what the manager of purchase thinks it stands for. We choose to concentrate on meat
and cured meat and limit our study to ICA, Axfood and Coop because they are the three
main actors in the Swedish branch of grocery.
The supplier has traditionally manufactured products and made there own brands. These
products have been distributed and sold to the consumer thru stores. Since 1950 it has
been a new situation on the grocery market in the world. The stores have started to
produced there own products and started to compete with the suppliers, so called private
brands. (Carlsson and Kikas, 2003) The first private brand in Sweden was Blåvitt, which
was the low price brand of KF in 1979. Blåvitt was the first generation of private brands.
Now it is time for the fourth generation of private brands, which means high quality and
higher price then before. They are comparable and have strength compete against other
similar products. (Wikström, 2003)
We wrote a questionnaire, which we used while interviewing store and head offices. The
interviewed could choose to answer by telephone, fax or mail. We got answers from all
of the stores and head offices except one SPAR store, which did not have time to answer
us. Even though the frequency of answers from the interviewed was good is the
examination to small to show statistic fact.
In our examination it has been shown that booth stores and head offices think that private
brands is growing bigger. Their own head offices control the purchase to private brands.
It is the price and demands from consumers, which controls the import of meat to the
grocery stores. It is some times hard to get enough of Swedish meat in good and even
quality. The consumers have big influence in what is bought in to the stores.
As local producer we think it is easiest to get the products sold to ICA stores since they
have freestanding merchants, who own the stores and decide they ...
