Peak Private Label

Owning the aisle.

Last week, Aldi announced they’re trimming their variety of private label brands to focus more narrowly on Aldi, alone. Tuesday, Amazon announced the launch of “Amazon Grocery”, combining Amazon Fresh with their Happy Bellies line; over 1,000 items, mostly under $5.

These two latest announcements prove: Private Label has become the brand.

To put this into perspective, the “category” (if we can call it that) at the country’s largest grocers has grown tremendously over the past few years: sales are projected to reach $277bn (!) this year, up from ~$262bn in 2023. And one of the most amazing single store brand stats is with Kirkland Signature that generates an estimated $58bn, making it one of the largest consumer brands by revenue globally.

At first, the massive surge in private label might seem like an obvious correlation to price sensitivity, Gen Z and Millennials being today’s most price-pressured shoppers. While, yes, the increase in these lines have strong overlap with rising inflation, there’s more to the story.

Private Label has become its own stratosphere, one that extends beyond price alone. The growth has been accelerated by brand fatigue and consumers feeling overwhelmed among a sea of “Better For You” sameness. And as the category continues to gain traction across retailers (private-label dollar sales were up 4.4% year over year in the first half of 2025), we’re seeing mistrust in big brands grow. As of 2025, 60% of shoppers trust store brands and 71% prefer them to national brands.

What pre-dated this–and coincided with my years at Whole Foods–was a time of true, verifiable white space in food and beverage. Consumers were waking up to their nutritional wants, and brands like Siete, Sir Kensington’s, Nutpods, and Once Upon a Farm were offering products highly differentiated from their legacy brethren. Brand launches felt purposeful, like they were serving an unmet need, and the response was massive ($17B shifted from large CPGs to emerging brands between 2013 and 2019).

Simultaneously, manufacturing partners started to wake up to the “better for you” demand, capacity and capabilities increased, and third-parties developed (Partnerslate, Chapter Foods, Keychain) to identify those facilities with unique capabilities and higher quality standards.

The pandemic accelerated both of these phenomena: more brands launched quickly (backed by record amounts of capital) and manufacturing became a little less opaque. The barrier to entry decreased for both “me too” brands and for grocers looking to develop private label lines with values.

This laid the groundwork for the private label category to explode. More brand malaise and skepticism from younger generations, more opportunity for grocers to launch their own lines. Now, and over the last few years, it’s become easier than ever for retailers to develop store brands tailored to modern tastes and attributes. This isn’t limited to the Foxtrots, Erewhons and Happier Grocers of the world but rather is showing-up in Aldi’s private label rebrand, Kroger’s Simple Truth, Walmart’s bettergoods lines and more. The perception around these items is on an upward trend, too. 46% of Gen Z and 50% of Millennial consumers say store brands offer better value.

So while shoppers are inherently driven by price, the underlying story to the success of private label is layered; rather than an alternative to name brands, these baskets have become a curated set of values and an overall lifestyle that minimizes decision-making.