Great 'disguised Own Brand' Hunt.

LB83_2

phoebe03cat wrote: »

Well yes..but I still do want them to have a reasonable level of nutrition. That said I've started feeding raw which is going really well and is cheaper. Their teeth are much better too BUT still want to feed tinned for one of the two meals.

Do you mind me asking what you feed them each day fresh? Mine too are just eating whiskas, if I give 1 of my cats anything else it results in a not very good litter tray or carpet for me!!! She is ok on fresh meat though but never know what or how much to give them as 1 of my cats is very greedy!!

Catslovelycats

I feed my cats JAmes Wellbeloved. It seems pricier but they eat less than canned stuff and it lasts ages.

jenniewb

Both my grandmother who used to breed cats and my mother who had a plain old moggie would feed their cats dried IAMS food. It works out a great deal cheaper and is easier to get a whole load delivered and store. Cats do get all the nutrition from it, you just need to make very sure they have adequate amounts of water.

Same goes with dog foods, my friend has a pedigree and because its a pedigree its had many many serious allergic reactions to just about everything it eats. It now eats Hills Science dried foods and seems to be doing well, my sister feeds her cat on the hills science plan for cats. This one does work out a tad more expensive though even if it is apparently better for the animal but I've no idea on the difference in price compared with tinned food.

Pentagon

As a student I packed supermarket fruit and veg. We'd fill the order and then the supervisor would give us all new stickers and packaging and we would carry on. All the same. apart from the prices, especially with M&S being the most expensive!

phoebe03cat

LB83 wrote: »

Do you mind me asking what you feed them each day fresh? Mine too are just eating whiskas,
Well I have a 'raw food' delivery for the dogs and cut up a chicken carcass (small) each day for the cats..has bits of chicken/offal still on it. Very cheap. You can hear them crunching the bones which cleans teeth. You have to add taurine powder though for anything other than red meat (its already in the tins) I also mix raw beef/lamb mince in the whiskers. Chunks of turkey/chicken and they love pork. Buy it from animal food man (cheap) or reduced in supermarket.

SRH_2

Stumbled across this thread while checking if Lidl curry sauces were any good (just bought a rogan josh one for a third of the price of my usual brand and it was fab - big chunks of onion and a good chilli kick).

Just to add my two-peneth...

I used to be a buyer for the country's largest mail order catalogue company and used to deal first-hand with the factories in Bangladesh, Pakistan, China, Brazil etc (99% of our stock was from outside the UK). The same factories would sell stock to our catalogue company as well as 90% of the high street. It got to the point where I could go in BHS, M&S, Topshop etc and recogise straight off products from my suppliers. Difference was ours were bargain basement prices for exactly the same products. Admittedly, quality control may have been different at the high street stores.

The worst for quality control was a 'designer' brand of jeans we sold for around the £80 mark (this was back in the early 1990s, so not cheap). The 'designer' simply sold the patterns for his clothes to factories overseas and they were able, for a licence fee, to use his name, irrespective of the quality of the material, stitching, colourfastness etc. 70% of the stock from this brand were usually sent back to the catalogue due to poor quality.

As staff we also used to get anything in the catalogue for the amount the company paid, plus a percentage handling fee. My best bargain was a French Connection bag - £60 on the high street, £1.30 for me! And to think French Connection were making a profit on what they sold it to the catalogue for. The bags must have cost less than £1 to make.

Needless to say I hate shopping now as I know how much consumers are being ripped off!

jenniewb

SRH wrote: »

Stumbled across this thread while checking if Lidl curry sauces were any good (just bought a rogan josh one for a third of the price of my usual brand and it was fab - big chunks of onion and a good chilli kick).

Just to add my two-peneth...

I used to be a buyer for the country's largest mail order catalogue company and used to deal first-hand with the factories in Bangladesh, Pakistan, China, Brazil etc (99% of our stock was from outside the UK). The same factories would sell stock to our catalogue company as well as 90% of the high street. It got to the point where I could go in BHS, M&S, Topshop etc and recogise straight off products from my suppliers. Difference was ours were bargain basement prices for exactly the same products. Admittedly, quality control may have been different at the high street stores.

The worst for quality control was a 'designer' brand of jeans we sold for around the £80 mark (this was back in the early 1990s, so not cheap). The 'designer' simply sold the patterns for his clothes to factories overseas and they were able, for a licence fee, to use his name, irrespective of the quality of the material, stitching, colourfastness etc. 70% of the stock from this brand were usually sent back to the catalogue due to poor quality.

As staff we also used to get anything in the catalogue for the amount the company paid, plus a percentage handling fee. My best bargain was a French Connection bag - £60 on the high street, £1.30 for me! And to think French Connection were making a profit on what they sold it to the catalogue for. The bags must have cost less than £1 to make.

Needless to say I hate shopping now as I know how much consumers are being ripped off!

Thanks for that- it doesn't suprize me! After my time learning about Textiles at Uni it became obvious how the retail thing worked, it seems to have multiple ways to basicly get a designer name on the clothes when the designer has little if anything to do with the end result- a designer selling a license to create his/her clothes regardless of fabric quality and even craftsmanship totally makes sense- I hate to say it, but many of the "designer" brands in mass-discount stores (I wont name names as I don't have actual evidence only that the quality difference sticks out a mile to me with what I have experienced but others from the stores have backed this up) all do this and its not suprizing that people balk at the price of real designer clothes when all they experience is the tat which is created in poor imitation of the real thing! Its such a difference to buy from the actual store itself.

The_Miser

SRH wrote: »

The same factories would sell stock to our catalogue company as well as 90% of the high street. It got to the point where I could go in BHS, M&S, Topshop etc and recogise straight off products from my suppliers. Difference was ours were bargain basement prices for exactly the same products. Admittedly, quality control may have been different at the high street stores.

As staff we also used to get anything in the catalogue for the amount the company paid, plus a percentage handling fee. My best bargain was a French Connection bag - £60 on the high street, £1.30 for me! And to think French Connection were making a profit on what they sold it to the catalogue for. The bags must have cost less than £1 to make.

Just to confirm what SRH writes, I used to see the shipping documents coming from the shippers evidencing identical shipments to a wide variety of companies. Often they were shipments of tinned foodstuffs labelled for the sellers - identical goods for the most discerning buyer and the then cheapest end of the market.

edwards6370

I worked for Aldi several years ago and we received our order of butter and Sainsburys order of butter, obviously the same brand but label change..... the price difference at that time was about 50p!

Ego_Shredder

katiecoodle wrote: »

total change of subject here. I was convinced earlier today when I was in Aldi that their new chocolate treats, Mysticals, were actually galaxy minstrels just in their own packaging. It was packaged like minstrels, looked like minstrels, felt like minstrels, but after finishing the entire bag I am now absolutely sure that they aren't minstrels. Wouldn't want anyone else to make the same mistake as me! Seriously - they are nowhere near as good as minstrels. Hope this helps someone.

I used to adore Minstrels and then a few years ago maybe ten, they changed the recipe and added a colossal amount of sugar making it taste like poison, and I opened the packet tasted a couple and spat them out quickly in shock and threw the whole packet in the bin. I never bought them again, and infact this has been a general trend right across the main brands and also cereals. So the only chocolate I will touch now is Green & Blacks and Lindt, which are both excellent; I prefer G & B for their milk chocolate because Lindt is shocking for the sugar. For dark chocolate I prefer Lindt as it is smoother and better balanced in flavour and sweetness.

I also find that the main brands of chocolate for the masses, have so much fat in them they are like slime. With so much fat they cannot melt properly in your mouth, and you end up producing that thick saliva which makes you go to a sink to spit it out. Quality chocolate will not have that effect on you.

People often tell me I have expensive taste for buying Green & Blacks or Lindt, but I just buy them on offer and eat a small amount at a time. So I probably spend about the same or less, than when I bought the cheap crap like Cadbury's or Galaxy.