Doing the Can-Can
By John J. Pierce

Microwave chunky beef with country vegetables soup from Stop & Shop is a new frontier for store brand canned goods.

It’s an old dance, but with a lot of new twists as retailers find market for niche, ethnic and organic products under store brand umbrellas.

Canned corn. Canned peaches. Canned soup. That’s what canned foods in store brands used to be all about, and those are the categories that still dominate the trade. Yet appearances can be deceptive.

Those canned vegetables aren’t necessarily corn or peas any more. They often include a number of niche items that the leading brands don’t bother with, but which appeal to ethnic markets and can profit retailers by being brought under the umbrella of store brands.

White and yellow hominy (pozole blanco and pozole amarillo), for example, are part of the Great Value line at Wal-Mart, Bentonville, AR, with bilingual packaging (including the nutritional facts panel), enabling the country’s largest retailer to reach the country’s largest minority group without creating a special brand.

For Southerners, there are collard greens and turnip greens, and for ordinary Middle Americans, Wal-Mart has broadened its Great Value range to include a vegetable medley (potatoes, green beans, corn, carrots and peas in onion juice) in addition to standard mixed vegetables, asparagus spears and three kinds of white potatoes—whole, sliced and diced.

Wal-Mart is hardly alone in putting its store brand on niche products. Hannaford, Scarborough, ME, offers cut yams. Giant Eagle, Pittsburgh, PA, has its own brand of white hominy. At Harris Teeter, Matthews, NC, the H.T. Traders brand includes San Marzano-style whole plum tomatoes and roasted red piquillo peppers (“Perfect for Italian recipes.”).

Organic and/or Healthy

When it comes to another niche market, organic vegetables, you really need a new brand, and Safeway, Pleasanton, CA, has gone all-out with its O Organics. Kidney beans are the latest addition to a line that already included black, pinto and garbanzo beans, all at $1.09 a can. “Food by Nature” is the slogan for O Organics, which offers more than 100 items in all departments.

At Ahold USA, Boston, MA, organic diced tomatoes and crushed tomatoes are new under the Nature’s Promise brand. As is nearly always the case with organic products, they command a premium-$1.79 a 28 oz can, versus 95 cents for the regular store brand (Stop & Shop or Giant) and $1.38 for Hunt’s.

Meanwhile, regular store brand tomato products at Ahold now include diced tomatoes with garlic and onions and diced tomatoes with zesty mild green chilies, both 59 cents a 15 oz can versus 75 cents for Del Monte.

Store brands were the first to offer low-salt canned vegetables and low-sugar canned fruits nearly 26 years ago. But fat is the big issue now, and retailers are changing formulations and packaging for a number of canned products that might otherwise convey a poor image to today’s shoppers.

Beef stew at Kroger, Cincinnati, OH, for example, now carries a call-out proclaiming “98% fat free.” With three servings to a 24 oz can, a serving provides only six percent of the daily allowance for saturated fat and 11% of that for cholesterol-but watch out for the sodium: 42%.

With federal regulations on labeling transfats coming into effect, Wal-Mart has not only been adding ratings to its Nutrition Facts panels but adding call-outs to labels boasting about any Great Value products that don’t have any trans fats, as with its 98% fat-free chunk chicken breast. Ahold USA hasn’t gone that far, but its Stop & Shop baked beans with bacon and brown sugar are shown as trans fat-free and billed as a “good source of fiber.” But again, sodium content is high.

Thinking Outside the Can

Canned foods don’t necessarily mean tin canned foods. Microwave soup, for example, is a hot thing right now, and Ahold has gotten into private label with both the Stop & Shop and Giant brands. Thus far the selection in both brands includes Beef with Country Vegetables, Sirloin Burger with Country Vegetables, and Chicken Noodle, but recent price spreads in New Jersey and Pennsylvania varied-$1.99 versus $2.59 at Stop & Shop, $1.65 versus $2.15 at Giant.

Not that traditional canned soup programs in private label are resting in their laurels. At Big Y, Springfield, MA, the World Classics Trading Co. line sourced from Topco Associates, Skokie, IL, includes shrimp bisque, pasta e fagiole, white chicken chili, tomato florentine and French onion. Some of these seem intended to stake out the same niche market as refrigerated soups at retailers like Safeway, but at $2.99 a 26 oz can, they’re a better buy-and most can’t be found in national brands.

Some vegetables, like beets, have traditionally been marketed in jarss rather than cans. But some retailers are going further now, as with Price Chopper, Schenectady, NY, with its Central Market Classics green asparagus, hearts of palm and water chestnuts. At Shaw’s, West Bridgewater, MA, you can find Holland style whole onions in jars, and Harris Teeter offers sliced pimentos.

H-E-B, San Antonio, TX, must have the largest bottled line under its Harvest Moon sub-brand: processed artichokes; processed asparagus; processed hearts of palm; processed mushrooms; processed pimentos; processed fire roasted red peppers; processed fire roasted yellow peppers; maraschino cherries; processed fruit salad; processed fruits, namely, figs, loquats, nisperos, (a fruit resembling a loquat) and mandarin oranges.