The Dupe Economy
Private label is no longer playing defense. It's winning.
Hello hello! đ
Let me tell you about a jar of almond butter.
Itâs sitting in my pantry right now. Creamy, no added sugar, dry-roasted. The label is cleanâsimple font, earthy color palette, nothing flashy. It tastes, genuinely, excellent. Iâve been buying it for three months straight.
Itâs Trader Joeâs house brand. It costs $4.99. The ârealâ version I used to buyâsame ingredients, nearly identical taste, much cooler brandingâruns $13 at Whole Foods.
I made my peace with this a while ago. Apparently, so did everyone else.
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We are living through the golden age of the dupe. And I donât mean the TikTok kind, where a fast fashion brand knocks off a designer bag and a 22-year-old gleefully holds both up to the camera. I mean something quieter and more structurally significant: the systematic, sophisticated, and increasingly unapologetic rise of private-label CPG.
Store brands used to be the walk of shame of the grocery aisle. The Great Value ketchup. The off-brand cereal in the bag instead of the box. The thing you bought when you were broke and pretended you didnât. The implicit message was: you couldnât afford the real thing, so hereâs this.
That stigma is gone. And itâs not coming back.
In 2024, private-label products reached a record share of total U.S. grocery sales â crossing 25% of units sold in many categories. The Private Label Manufacturers Association reported that store brand dollar sales grew faster than national brands for the third consecutive year. And perhaps more telling than any statistic: consumers who traded down to store brands during the inflation crunch of 2022 and 2023 largely havenât traded back up.
They tried the dupe. They liked it. They stayed.
What changed, exactly?
A few things converged at once, and itâs worth pulling them apart.
First, the quality gap actually closed. This is the foundational shift that makes everything else possible. Retailersâespecially the ones who take food seriouslyâspent years investing in their house brands. Trader Joeâs built an entire identity around the concept. Costcoâs Kirkland Signature became a punchline in the best possible way: people genuinely brag about it. Targetâs Good & Gather line launched in 2019 with a real food-first philosophy and has expanded to over 2,000 products. Whole Foodsâ 365 brand was acquired and amplified.
These arenât âclose enoughâ products anymore. Many of them are made in the same facilities as the national brands, sometimes literally on the same production lines, with tweaked formulations and unbranded packaging. The gap between a $14 olive oil and a $7 house brand olive oil, in terms of actual taste and quality, isâin many casesânegligible.
Second, inflation broke the spell of premium pricing. When grocery bills spiked 20%+ between 2021 and 2023, consumers became ferocious label-readersâand not just for ingredients. They started comparing prices with real scrutiny for the first time in years. What they found, in category after category, was that the premium they were paying for name brands wasnât necessarily buying them better product. It was buying them marketing. Distribution. The familiarity of a logo theyâd grown up with.
For a lot of people, that was a genuinely clarifying moment.
Thirdâand this one is underappreciatedâthe cultural cachet of âfinding a good dupeâ became a whole thing.TikTok didnât invent dupe culture in CPG, but it turbo-charged it. There are entire accounts dedicated to blind taste tests between store brands and their name-brand equivalents. Costco haul videos. Aldi finds. âI switched to this and never looked backâ content that performs extremely well because it feels like insider knowledgeâlike youâre being let in on a secret the brands donât want you to know.
Frugality used to be embarrassing. Now itâs a flex.
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So what does this mean for emerging and premium brands?
Hereâs where it gets complicated. Because the story isnât simply âstore brands win, everyone else loses.â Itâs messier and more interesting than that.
The brands getting hurt worst are the ones in the middleâestablished national brands with significant legacy overhead, mature distribution, and no particularly compelling reason to exist beyond decades of habit and shelf placement. Think: the third-ranked salad dressing, the second-most-popular pasta sauce, the private equity-owned snack brand coasting on a name from the â90s. These are the products getting squeezed from both sidesâby premium indie brands on one end and private label on the other.
If you donât have a genuinely differentiated product or a price advantage, youâre in trouble.
For emerging premium brands, the calculus is differentâbut the pressure is real. Hereâs the core tension: the consumer who is willing to pay $12 for your hot sauce is increasingly asking why. Not in a hostile way. In a legitimate, show-me way. Theyâve been burned by enough pretty packaging over enough years that the aesthetics alone donât move them anymore. The bar for justifying a premium has gone up.
What justifies it now?
A few things actually work. True differentiation â a genuinely novel ingredient, process, or flavor profile that canât be easily replicated at scale â still commands a premium. Provenance and transparencyâbrands where the sourcing story is real and verifiable, not just a font choiceâstill hold power with a meaningful slice of consumers. Community and identityâthe brands where buying the product is a statement of belonging to somethingâstill convert.
What doesnât work anymore is vibes alone. Clean branding used to be enough to signal quality. Now it signals that you hired a good designer. Thatâs not nothing, but itâs not sufficient.
The most interesting response Iâve seen from premium brands is a kind of radical honestyâleaning into what makes them expensive rather than obscuring it. Less âcrafted with careâ vagueness, more âwe pay our farmers 40% above market rate and hereâs exactly what that does to our margins.â Transparency as differentiation. Itâs not a mass strategy, but for the right brand with the right audience, itâs working.
A word on the retailers
It would be a mistake to discuss the dupe economy without acknowledging that the incentives here are not neutral.
Retailers love private label. The margin structure is significantly better than selling national brands. They control the supply chain. They control the placement. They can put their house brand at eye level and nudge the name brand to the bottom shelf, and thereâs not a lot the brand can do about it. As private-label quality has improved, retailers have become increasingly aggressive about expanding their house offerings into new categoriesâincluding ones that were, until recently, considered âsafeâ premium territory.
This creates a genuinely uncomfortable dynamic for brands that rely heavily on any single retail channel. Youâre essentially helping your landlord understand which categories are profitable, and then watching them compete with you in those categories.
The brands navigating this best are the ones diversifying their retail footprint, investing in DTC, and building direct consumer relationships that exist outside of the retailerâs ecosystem. The brand that lives entirely on grocery shelves, with no meaningful community or DTC presence, is increasingly vulnerable.
I want to end with something that I think gets lost in these conversations.
The dupe economy is, in many ways, a good thing for consumers. More access to quality products at lower price points is not a problem. The fact that a family thatâs watching their grocery budget can buy excellent olive oil and almond butter and pasta without paying a premium for a logoâthatâs genuinely good.
The challenge for the industry is figuring out what role branded products play in a world where quality is no longer a reliable differentiator at the premium tier. And I think the honest answer is: the brands that survive this era will be the ones that offer something a store brand structurally cannotâa real point of view, a community, a story that is verifiably true and meaningfully different.
Thatâs a higher bar than it used to be.
But for the brands that can clear it, the dupe economy might actually be clarifying. Itâs forcing the question every brand should be able to answer anyway:
Why do you exist?
Thoughts? Brands youâve switched to or away from? Reply and let me knowâbest responses might end up in a future issue.
â Tom
If you found this useful, forward it to someone in CPG, retail, or anyone who has ever felt smug about their Kirkland Signature find. (Thatâs all of us.)