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Notes -
Why do people buy name brand over generic groceries? They're often identical. Are people just stupid? But it's such a blatant case about which product is better. They'll be identical products, next to each other on the shelf, except one costs about 25% less. The only difference is that the other product has commercials advertising it. I have friends insist that name brand tastes better, but the contents are literally identical.
In Britain there's a popular-ish show called 'Eat Well for Less', with Greg Wallace, in which for a week a family who thinks they need to reduce their food bill has all their groceries replaced with new ones with all the branding removed so they don't know what they're getting. Invariably none of them can tell the difference when their branded products are replaced with the cheapo own-brand 'value' range, despite them all usually insisting beforehand that they'll be able to tell. Most amusing though is when they insist they don't like the replacement, only to find out they've been double bluffed and it was in fact the same brand as they have always been eating/drinking, and they look like morons. The vast majority of people who genuinely think they can tell a difference have definitely just been sucked in by marketing, which I suspect applies to most of the people in this thread insisting 'no, Heinz ketchup really is different to all the others!'.
Do they actually go over what percentage of overall food spending these brand changes represent? It looks like just a trick to amuse viewers, and not a big part of the actual saving money part of things. When I looked up a show, one of the results was a recipe for a potato soup, which, sure.
Last night we were eating burgers, and first we decided to get the (store brand) ones with slightly higher quality meat, then we grilled them with charcoal (is charcoal branding a thing? I don't know), then we decided that since the coals were already warm, why not grill some (store brand) shrimp as well? And since there was shrimp, I got some (sure, way more expensive than generic supermarket corn) farmer's market blue corn grits ready for breakfast. We also consumed soda, then manhattans.
If we really wanted to save money, we would have made completely different choices along multiple axes unrelated to brands. The brands or lack thereof were not a major factor in how much the meal cost.
Yeah they'll usually be some sort of VO saying 'if the Smith family switch to Tesco value baked beans they can save £100 a year' or whatever. There are other sorts of changes which perhaps make more of difference; usually cooking more meals from scratch and avoiding silly 'conveniences' with a big markup like pre-grated cheese and pre-chopped vegetables, but there are definitely substantial savings to be had from avoiding big brand names.
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Color me skeptical of just how honest the show is being with participants and viewers. I remember back a couple decades ago when I first started hearing these stories about how social science had proved that people can't tell the difference between cheap wine and fancy wine, and sometimes can't even tell the difference between red and white wine in a blinded taste test. Me, as an absolute moron, simply believed that these smug hacks were doing actual scientific work where they were engaged in truth-seeking adopted that stance as a smug hack and repeated this "fact" about how stupid these rich people were.
Fast forward a couple decades, and I am a whiskey enthusiast. With dozens of bottles on the shelf, I can correctly identify specific bourbons in blinded taste tests without any real problem. I'm not even talking about things that are dramatically different styles - I can consistently identify the difference between Old Forester single barrel picks and Four Roses single barrel picks. These are barely different products at all, both being (primarily) corn distillate aged in charred, new American oak barrels for a few years, then dumped and bottled at barrel-proof. And yet, they're easy for anyone that enjoys bourbon to tell apart. While I haven't replicated such a test with wine because I'm not much of a wine enthusiast, there is simply no goddamned way that anyone that has any experience is going to confuse a sauv blanc with a cabernet.
So, when I hear that there is a show that profits from making people look stupid when they fail to identify the difference between products that literally have different ingredients, I am skeptical. What are they doing to arrive at that presentation? I don't know, but I bet that if I can tell the difference a couple bourbons, many people can actually tell the difference between Frank's Red Hot, Tabasco, and store brands without any trouble.
Are there people who can't tell Frank's Red Hot and Tabasco apart? They use different peppers. Frank's has paprika and garlic powder in it. Frank's is much more about adding flavour.
Tabasco tastes like vinegar and fire. It's used when you want to add neutral heat.
Store brands vary wildly.
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Scott himself wrote an article about that exact thing: Is Wine Fake?, and yes, the study where people were tricked with colored wine was as garbage as one might expect – they tested undergraduates and not experts, and the test consisted of affixing descriptors to two wines, which resulted in them affixing the red-wine associated ones to red-colored wines more often than chance. Going from this to "people can't tell red and white wines apart" is a Grand Canyon-sized leap.
Why would they necessarily want experts? If all they setting out to prove is that ordinary people can't tell the difference between better and worse wines, then obviously they wouldn't test experts or enthusiasts.
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FWIW it's BBC so they're actually not making a profit, though obviously yes the individual showrunners and the BBC at large want to see the programs get good ratings.
I think the general point though is that of course if you care to pay attention to these things you can tell the difference, but most people are not an 'enthusiast' about most of the things they eat and drink. A ketchup enthusiast may have genuine and consistent preferences, but I doubt that's true of the majority of the population. On the whole it's a pretty sedate show and if you watch it while there are sections of the show (not the swaps week bit) which are likely semi-staged (alongside ordinary consumer advice scripted bits in factories etc. which aren't pretending to not be so) I doubt anybody would care enough to fake it. Most of the time they aren't make to look total fools - in fact much of the time they will correctly identify that something has changed, but will say they don't mind it anyway and would happily change to save money. So often rather than not being able to tell the difference (though that does happen) it's more that own-brand stuff is not actually worse than brand-name even if 'different'.
Well they aren't usually as different as the example of hot sauces, it's more things like cheese, vegetables, soft drinks etc.
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