There is far less competition than it appears, which is why brands are so important for maintaining the fictional appearance of it. This is why some of the left say "there is no ethical consumption under capitalism" = while it's a crappy slogan, the reality is that many well-meaning consumers who try to vote with their wallets are just picking 'nicer' brands but still giving their money to the same places, and their buying decisions have far more influence on the way goods and services are marketed than the way they are produced.

Now, in some places you can absolutely vote with your dollars, buying locally produced food and keeping the money circulating within your community and so forth. But that's also a bit of a luxury choice - you're willing to pay a bit more, and have the know-how to figure out the difference between a genuine small business that's doing right by its employees/the environment/whatever you care about, and a hip brand that is associated with those values but actually yet another front for a large corporate concern. Many people don't have those choices available (their only buying options maybe through superstores like Walmart or Dollar Tree), or lack the insight to see through the multiple layers of marketing and the economic pros and cons of our complex business infrastructure.

Unilever and other big conglomerates do actually put their logo on the products so if you pay careful attention you can see that information just by inspecting the packaging at the supermarket, but to most people that's just another certification stamp.

My understanding is that the "there is no ethical consumption under capitalism" phrase is meant as a direct antithesis of the "liberal idea that there is no such thing as a systemic issue, it's just that the wrong people are in charge". It is, I feel, often interpreted as unnecessarily defeatist, but I instead interpret it not as that you should just give your money to the worst company you can because it's all evil capitalism anyway, but that these changes alone will not solve the underlying and inherent issues of the system.

It's interesting that you mention these 'greenwashing' marketing tactics as well, as I have never really drawn a line between these two phenomena. I am always surprised to hear how many very smart and un-naive people fall for transparent tricks like this. It seems that, like Harley stating that they don't sell motorcycles, they sell a lifestyle, these companies could be said to sell neo-liberalism along with their products. No need to worry about the fact that a system where corporations are destroying the planet might not be perfect, I bought from a company that donated $100k to save the Orangutans once etc.

Note also that the worshipping around Elon Musk is much the same thing, just for techies.

Nit: neoliberalism means different things depending on context, but it really doesn’t mean “new-fangled leftism”.

Neoliberalism(as leftists use the word) is used quite appropriately here. See Zizek:

> Let’s turn to the high point of our consumerism. Let me take a drink.

> Starbucks coffee. I’m regularly drinking it, I must admit it. But are we aware, that when we buy a cappuccino from Starbucks, we also buy quite a lot of ideology? Which ideology?

> You know, when you enter a Starbucks store, it’s usually always displayed in some posters, their message, which is: “Yes, our cappuccino is more expensive than others,” but, then comes the story.

> “We give 1% all our income to some Guatemalan children to keep them healthy, for the water supply for some Saharan farmer, or to save the forest, to enable organic growing for coffee, or whatever or whatever.”

> Now, I admire the ingenuity of this solution. In the old days of pure, simple consumerism, you bough a product, and then you felt bad. “My God, I’m just a consumerist, while people are starving in Africa . . .”

> So the idea is that you had to do something to counteract your pure, destructive consumerism. For example, I don’t know, you contribute to charity and so on.

> What Starbucks enables you, is to be a consumerist, without any bad conscience, because the price for the countermeasure, for fighting consumerism, is already included into the price of a commodity. Like, you pay a little bit more, and you’re not just a consumerist, but you do also your duty towards the environment, the poor, starving people in Africa, and so on and so on.

> It’s, I think, the ultimate form of consumerism.

I was unaware that zizek called this form of consumerism neoliberalism. I was only aware of the economic definition of the term relating to Keynesian economics and deregulation and the like. The reason I piped up is because that definition is really more in line with American right-wing policies (although Democrats seem to have little issue getting on board...)

In America, "Liberals" are "The Left", while in other countries, "Liberals" are "The Right". Many internet discussions on economic policy fall into misunderstanding due to these types of terminology differences

Yeah the word "Liberal" is vague enough that it has a wikipedia disambiguation page with 12 different political idealogies. I refuse to use it and usually avoid conversations involving it because of how many things it can mean.

What makes you think that is what I think it means? I'm not a native speaker, perhaps I could improve that section a bit for future readers.

> Note also that the worshipping around Elon Musk is much the same thing, just for techies.

Huh, you mean Musk doesn't actually push R&D more than other car manufacturers / launch providers?

Its only natural those marketing tactics work. Who the hell does have the time to research environmental impact when buying a $4 brush. Don't forget to also research its durability, health impacts, social ethics, and so on. Apart from "evil" gov regulations, consumer organizations can help you to at least some degree. But i doubt that is enough for a good society.

> the reality is that many well-meaning consumers who try to vote with their wallets are just picking 'nicer' brands but still giving their money to the same places

Exactly. I can't think of a better example of this than Dove branding (love-your-body-in-any-shape-or-size feminism) compared to Axe (our deodorant will make hot chicks love you).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silk_(brand) is owned by a parent company that owns a lot of dairy brands, but their marketing emphasizes feeling good about consuming a completely non-dairy product (which some customers, like me, do because of objections to the dairy industry).

You can see some of this on display at

https://silk.com/our-story/history

https://silk.com/healthy-living/plant-based-diet

Notice the Danone link at the bottom of those pages (!!). (Americans will know their yogurt brand as "Dannon".)

The money might ultimately end up in the bank account of the same company that runs veal farms, but it's still sending a trackable signal.

Same with cars, buy a Bolt or a Prius and the money still goes to GM and Toyota. But the signal it sends is pretty clear (and it's clear car companies are seeing consumers voting with their wallets).

This is how it should work. We all want change to happen quickly and we want companies who suddenly (20 years ago, milk wasn't cruel) find themselves on the wrong side of morality to be punished. But it's more reasonable (and probably better) for this to happen gradually.

That some brands are less transparent than Bolt == GM, Prius == Toyota, doesn't seem materially relevant.

(I realize you weren't necessarily passing judgement, just some facts (which I didn't know!), so I'm not saying you're wrong, I'm just injecting my opinion onto your facts).

In fact, I basically agree with your view most of the time. Thanks for adding your thoughts.

A counterpoint is basically about giving companies resources that they might use to cross-subsidize advertising or lobbying on behalf of their other business units, affecting the demand, political environment, or cultural environment that those other business units face. In the electric car example, maybe some of the revenue from electric car sales allows manufacturers to lobby on emissions regulations in a way that some of the electric car buyers might strongly disagree with.

When people I know "vote with their wallet" they are buying handmade soaps at the farmer's market (for example), not Dove. Even brands like Organic Valley and Patagonia are probably only moderately better than average.

This is not how the argument against “ethical consumption” goes. There never will be anything close to enough soap artisans to meet even a tiny fraction of the demand; and even if production would be greatly expanded, the product would still be unobtainable fore a large majority. Therefore, buying handmade soap from the farmers market will never be more than a fashion statement.

Dove is for women. Axe is for men.

Ironically there are "Axe for Women" and "Dove Men" products.

> There is far less competition than it appears

And then looking at who owns all the huge companies: Vanguard, Wellington, BlackRock, State Street, Fidelity, etc.

Who owns BlackRock? PNC, Vanguard, State Street, Wellington, Fidelity, etc.

Who is this PNC? BlackRock, Vanguard, Fidelity, State Street, Wellington, etc.

It's just a big incestuous orgy of pension fund managers pretending to diversify and skimming a little off each trade.

Huh? Are you confusing brokerages with mutual fund?

And you have to read the fine print carefully too. When I forst moved to California, I was buying Knudsen brand dairy products thinking I was buying some kind of local product. But upon closer inspection, I found that it is actually just another brand owned by Kraft.

I still buy it, but I know to treat it like a commodity product and buy when the sale is good rather than a premium product that someone is actually taking pride in and might be worth the premium occasionally.

Similar to Anheuser-Busch selling off-label "microbrews" with no information on their true origin other than "Brewed in St. Louis".

> and their buying decisions have far more influence on the way goods and services are marketed than the way they are produced.

This is gold.

> buying decisions have far more influence on the way goods and services are marketed than the way they are produced.

But if I buy Fair Trade products, even if they're from Unilever/P&G/whatever, don't I still influence the way they are produced? Sure, Unilever would still be producing non-Fair Trade products, but only because other people are buying those.

> their buying decisions have far more influence on the way goods and services are marketed than the way they are produced.

The brand has to reflect the reality eventually; if Dove was being made in sweatshops (for example) that would be a news story sooner or later, in a way that it wouldn't for a brand that didn't have the same image. Likewise if you work for a company whose whole image is x, the easiest way to project it is simply to be x; it takes a lot more effort to fake a position you don't believe in than it does to simply believe that position. Even if the CEO is operating on pure cynicism, if the employees are constantly told that they're working for a company with strong ethical values they'll start to believe that and that will affect how they make decisions in their work.

I wonder what the effect of limiting a conglomerate to 5 companies would be.

Eternal court battles about what counts as a company to start.

You'd rather have to put some limit on how big a company could be, in terms of revenue/etc., and also limit the ability of people or organizations to own multiple companies.

But that's called communism and is frowned upon in most capitalist growth-must-be-eternal countries.

none. A company can own multiple brands.

And indeed they do - look at the beer market, AB InBev - one company, has ~500 brands.

No that's not a typo, the number is around five hundred.

Only works care about competition. Consumers care about having good choices. Why should they care who the investors are?

There are only a few companies that own nearly all brands you can find in a typical first world supermarket. Not much more than these few: Procter&Gamble, Unilever, Mars, Mondelez, Goodman Fielder, Nestle

A few years ago, Australian supermarkets (Coles and Woolworths) started manufacturing and selling their own versions of popular products, usually with preferred placement and 10-20% lower price.

But your point remains valid here. A small number of companies control a huge percentage of supply.

That happens in the US as well. Aldi and Costco have a lot of their own brands. Roundys used to be the generic brand of a nearby grocery store, but then Kroger bought them out. Kroger owns multiple chains of grocery stores across the country, including different ones in the same town sometimes.

The funny thing is that they probably use the same manufacturers as the popular brands and just also a different label on it.

No "probably" about it. The price of entry into a supermarket's inventory is often a discounted-enough rate on white-label stuff that they can sell right beside you. I got an education stocking shelves at a supermarket as a kid. Pretty hard not to make the connection when the bakery dropped off loaves of store brand and their brand, intermixed in the same trays, and we had to separate them out.

> The funny thing is that they probably use the same manufacturers as the popular brands and just also a different label on it.

They absolutely do. For example, Costco has two Kirkland Signature vodkas. One of them is Grey Goose, and the other I forgot. Skyy? Same goes for their tequila, it's all Jose Cuervo.

Look up Frank-Lin distillers sometime.

https://ello.co/dredmorbius/post/bztu6ot3xumpeiiiygdzaa

http://www.frank-lin.com/

http://www.dailyrepublic.com/news/topstories/fairfield-offic...

http://www.webcitation.org/5jjmHRr9C

and the rest of the grocery stores are probably safeway..

This happens in all supermarkets of Europe, basically. Examples from Germany:

Depending on the store you get either mostly only store products (Aldi, Lidl), both store products and brand products (Kaufland, Rewe?) or mostly brand products (likely Edeka)

The case of what you mentioned is the reason why the Schwarz Group (Lidl and Kaufland) are moving overseas, respectively to the US and to Australia: there isn't much price competition.

Disclaimer: work for them.

American grocery stores have been doing this for a long time as well. Often their products taste better too because they use less added sugars and preservatives.

I remember a story about M&S in the U.K. Up until a few years ago they only sold their own brand food, which had a higher price and a higher perceived quality to other supermarket brands.

The story goes that their biscuits are made in the same factory and cooked in the same batch as other brands, but M&S required that their biscuits be taken from the centre of the tray where they were cooked in the oven more evenly.

I swore off Nilla Wafers in favor of store brands in the 90's because Nabisco ruined them by trying to extend the shelf life with preservatives so much that they were never crispy out of a fresh box and had an awful taste. Years later I discovered they changed their ways with a foil lining instead of the preservative overload but I still won't buy them.

Great diagram, but it misses precisely what I found surprising about the whole thing, which is that they also own non-food brands (Axe etc.).

Here's a older brand map that also includes the non-food products:

https://crueltyfreeblog.files.wordpress.com/2015/05/foodmap....

Sometimes I wish someone would pass a law that forbid the modern use of brands. If you are a company, anything you control should carry your own name first and foremost. It would remove the illusion of choice that the current market of manufactured goods and food strives to provide in order to avoid organised dissent.

Do you mean branding must reflect ownership?

Banning the use of brands obviously won't achieve anything desirable, but requiring transparent branding seems like it will improve the consumer market's spending decisions.

Of course, pro-free-market legislation will never make it through Republican-controlled Congress...

Restricting what brand names people can use is anything but "pro-free-market".

That wasn't the proposal, the proposal was to enforce better information availability to consumers by displaying the owners of the brand prominently.

IANANC but my understanding is that a true market is two-sided: it requires informed consumers. Initiatives that bolster the buyer-side of the market aren't anti-market.

Calling a newly proposed regulation "pro free market" legislation is a little orwellian.

How free is a monopolized market? If a regulation outlaws monopolies, does it improve or impede the market's freedom?

Regulations that improve market efficiency are good. Regulations that impede efficiency are bad. In practice, we do need regulations because real-world actors are not optimal rational agents.

I can see it from that point of view. I purposely don't use the phrase "free market" though, because I don't share the assumption that complete freedom is what leads to an efficient, well functioning market. There is all sorts of manipulation that is required for a "good" market, i.e. one that fulfills the goal of efficient allocation of goods.

The most basic is the enforcement of contracts, which I think everyone agrees on.

But regulations about truth in advertising fit in there too. Lists of ingredients and nutritional information on packaging are an onerous regulation that allow consumers to make better informed choices (and so lead IMO to a "better" market). (I think brand ownership transparency is close philosophically to requiring ingredients on food products.) There are many examples of regulations that promote market efficiency, which sellers don't like because they may have been making profits from the inefficiency, or from information asymmetry.

There are of course regulations which degrade market efficiency too, either by regulatory capture or ill-thought out "consumer protection" like price controls, rent control, etc.

My overall point is that the assumption that a market with the fewest controls is de-facto the "best" market should be examined closely - manipulations of the market (whether by regulation, taxes, etc.) should be evaluated on a case-by-case basis based on whether they promote or degrade market efficiency.

Okay. How about pro-efficient markets? Because certainly markets completely unrestrained leads to rent seeking.

The orwellianism already exists in the technical definition of "free market". The proposed regulation would be anti-lassiez-faire, but pro-free-market, to use the terminology that economists have pushed.

> better information availability to consumers

Devil's advocate...

Brands can be a mnemonic that helps customers quickly recall relative quality experienced in previous purchases. This may vary across brands, and my experiences with Dove soap don't tell me anything about my experiences with Ben and Jerry's ice cream.

Brands are often silly and misleading and I try to avoid them, but they aren't inherently malicious by default.

Any medium that can manipulate can also inform.

Yes, exactly - informed consumers are one of the requirements for a free market. Agents cannot act rationally when information is obscured.

In this case, the information is technically available but obscured such that consumers cannot make educated purchasing decisions without expending an irrational amount of time... thereby reducing supply-side competition.

Even if the information was available, most consumers don't study the entire supply chain of a product or service. We trust legislation to keep poisons out of our foods and punish cartels.

Smith's original phrasing wasn't "free market" it was "freely competitive market". They're very different concepts.

Depends on how you view “free market.” Some would say that, for a free market to work at all, you need informed choice on the side of consumers. Transparent branding would definitely be included in that.

You'd think so, but Nestle already does this of their own free will and they don't really seem to suffer for it.

I dont know about that, why shouldn't a corporation, effectively a person, use lawful speech to define how the world sees it? If you care enough, it easy enough to be informed about who is producing your food.

I feel this is something like identity politics, and something that really does not need regulation except to allow those to identify however they wish, with no determent to others.

Because a corporation should not be considered "effectively a person".

Corporations are made up of people, yes, but giving them personhood is a pretty dangerous idea. Should they get to vote? Obviously, the answer has to be "no" or else people will register companies to rig elections.

If they can't vote, are they really people?

> Corporations are made up of people, yes, but giving them personhood is a pretty dangerous idea. Should they get to vote? Obviously, the answer has to be "no" or else people will register companies to rig elections.

This logic is hugely flawed. Since we work off of a one-person-gets-one-ballot system, grouping people together (as in a corporation) and giving them a vote wouldn't make any sense. By contrast, you can't "use up" your speech rights: Each person is allowed an unlimited amount of legal speech, and I don't think there's a compelling philosophical argument that a group of people speaking together isn't protected. There may be _pragmatic_ arguments, but that's another ballgame altogether, since the entire point of the Constitution is that it's _not_ subject to the pragmatism/whims of the time.

I'm not saying that "corporations should be legally modeled as people" is an ironclad truth, but none of your objections make sense.

the persons in the corporation would not lose their vote. the corporation is just one additional person, meaning someone could create multiple corporate persons and multiply their vote (at least, in OP's hypothetical scenario)

I think you misunderstand the argument made by many who say "a corporation is people". "Corporate personhood" is just a word the left uses to make it sound crazy.

In reality, the argument is that you can't restrict a corporation's speech because using a corporation to speak is merely a form or method people use to speak.

You could speak via billboards, grass roots organizations, a radio show, lettets, or even a company you own.

The government can't curtail your speech no matter the method.

more generally, "corporate personhood" in US law, going back to at least the 1790s and in other countries going back even longer, serves the legal purpose of establishing that when people work together to do something under the "corporate" banner (which allows them to have a succession of members working toward a common goal and pooling resources), they retain rights like speech, property ownership, and ability to enter into or terminate contracts including hiring and firing employees. This connects to the idea (expressed by chief justice Marshall) that "The great object of an incorporation is to bestow the character and properties of individuality on a collective and changing body of men."

Sheesh I wish I had read your response before posting my own. This more succinctly captures what I'm trying to say.

Right, and that's what I'm saying is flawed logic and a bad analogy for speech rights. Putting people in different groupings doesn't change how many votes they get, and saying that "corporations are people means corporations get their own separate vote" is a gross misunderstanding of what we're talking about. When someone says "corporations are people", they're saying "corporations are simply a grouping of people taking an action together".

The people who comprise a group have no extra vote to give: if two friends and I form a group, a new vote allocated to the three of us doesn't magically materialize. By contrast, since there is no quota for speech per person, two friends and I can form a group (eg, an advocacy group) and tomorrow go down to Union Square (or buy airtime, or hand out pamphlets, or stand on a street corner) and engage in whatever legal speech we like, collectively. The claim is that if that group of people happens to be given the structure "corporation", that doesn't automatically allow for infringing on the rights of the people within the corporation to engage in legal speech.

Again, I'm making no statement as to whether I think this approach is wise or good for society or not, but it's astonishing how common it is to see people who completely don't know what they're talking about on this issue and yet are somehow super passionate about it.

Legal personhood is a concept that applies to ships, cities, states, and countries as well as human beings and corporations. It's a legal fiction that serves specific legal purposes; abandoning the entire concept because you don't think corporations should have the same set of rights as human beings is excessive because different types of legal persons already have different sets of legal rights.

>If they can't vote, are they really people?

If they aren't, then what exactly are felons and foreigners?

It’s a bad analogy. The better is because they don’t breath, don’t have a pulse, and don’t have human DNA, they are not really people, and should not be treated as such.

Tying the definition of personhood to voting is problematic. I agree that there should be some distinction between human beings and corporations. I don’t have an answer to what that distinction should be, but I don’t think voting is it.

> why shouldn't a corporation, effectively a person...

Why shouldn't a corporation, effectively a person, use the vast wealth at it's disposal to influence elections and steer government policy in the direction it wants?

Hmmm, perhaps we should rethink this whole corporations as persons thing.

Who should determine the will of this corporate-person? The shareholders? The board? The managing director? If I own a stake in an index fund, how do I propagate my will proportionately to the actions of these corporations? Corporate-persons is an area fraught with agent problems, and should therefore not be allowed.

If corporations were people, we'd call them people. Don't start an argument on a worthless premise.

I'd like that. 'Sucralose' is a brand intended to seem like a substance. It's neither a sugar nor an ose: it's C12H19Cl3O8 also known as (1→6)-Dichloro-(1→6)-dideoxy-β-D-fructofuranosyl-4-chloro-4-deoxy-α-D-galactopyranoside. If you burn it at over 662 degrees you get polychlorinated dibenzo-p-dioxin smoke, which makes sense considering that you make 'sucralose' by a chlorinating process.

I have some nasty reactions to the stuff and so did my late mother, who was a total skeptic to all crunchy-granola pure-foodery. I hate that they can brand a strange chemical like this with the names of natural sweeteners and then we're expected to call it by that name. Though I admit DichlorodideoxyβDfructofuranosyl4chloro4deoxyαDgalactopyranoside is much harder to say, and contains letters that aren't even letters at all.

Splenda is a brand. Sucralose is a substance. No TM, no brand any more than bananas is.

To add on top of that sucralose is a sugar, just one where 5 oxygen atoms are replaced by chlorine.

You missed Kraft Heinz.

Kraft became Mondelez.

Kraft split into two companies, one of which became Mondelez, the other (later) merged with Heinz and became Kraft Heinz.

I stand corrected. I wasn't aware of the Kraft Heinz merger.

and in usa, conagra

One or two companies own almost every widely-known beer as well.

That's a little bit tautological and a little bit misleading; tautological because widely-known beers have nationwide production and distribution and so of course they're produced by big companies, and misleading because unlike unlike self-care products like Axe and Dove, the different beer "brands" owned by major brewing firms tend to be run out of different breweries with different practices; they're different products, just with shared financing.

And, obviously, within any one local market, there will be far more better-known regional brands, often not owned by any big corporation.

Most have merged recently and are global. Give it ten years and bet you’ll find the breweries have consolidated somewhat.

That is the exact opposite of what has been happening in recent years. Bigger independent breweries get bought out but more smaller ones take their place.

https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2018/01/craft-b...

AB InBev has a 28% global market share for beer. Interestingly as beer consumption shifts towards craft beers they are buying up a lot of the more well known and successful ones.

They can't do it fast enough though, or at least I hope, to make a legitimate entry into the craft market. I think among people into craft beer it's well known that AB InBev owns Goose, Michelob, Shocktop, Corona, Stella, Modelo. Elysian is less-known as an AB-InBev brand but it's becoming more well known. They have to know that their business practices taints any brand that they buy out at this point, it's just a matter of milking popular high-quality brands as long as they can before public reception catches on

I think it's also important to understand that most of these companies are advertising companies first and foremost. Their business models revolve around the creation of demand for things that no rational society would want.

Why would anyone buy bottled water when it comes practically free from the tap? Why would anyone buy bread that has had all the tasty goodness removed ('white bread')? Why would anyone buy branded toothpaste when the chemically-identical supermarket version is half the price? Why would anyone want roasted grain coated in sugar as the first thing you eat each day? Would anyone buy sugary water (a.k.a. pop) if they knew just how bad sugar is for them? Why would anyone want hydrogenated vegetable oil instead of butter?

Unilever can go hang.

> Why would anyone buy bottled water

Some reasons: immediacy, taste, convenience, quality, lack of price sensitivity.

> Why would anyone buy [prepackaged white bread]

Texture, goes stale slower than fresh baked bread, sizing, taste, convenience.

> Why would anyone buy [brand toothpaste vs store-brand toothpaste]

Taste, familiarity, trust.

>> Why would anyone buy [brand toothpaste vs store-brand toothpaste]

> Taste, familiarity, trust.

That's the idea; familiarity and trust can be manufactured through advertising. You can become familiar with a brand name just by being exposed to it, and trust is harder but advertisers have it down to a science in some important ways.

There is more to trust than advertising. You also must produce a consistent product.

A colleague of mine purchases 12x 500ML bottles of Evian a week. That will be over 600 bottles of water in 2018, not including the bottled water he drinks at home.

Sure, bottled water tastes a little better than tap water, but I can’t help but cringe at the thought of 600 plastic bottles going into landfill. I avoid bottled water as much as possible, however when required I admit I do purchase 6 packs of 2L bottles for long road trips.

> Sure, bottled water tastes a little better than tap water

I guess it depends on where you live, but this is definitely not the case for me. And I live in a 111 year old building.

Old lead pipes apparently do make water taste sweeter...

I did this when I was in Thailand and thought it was completely insane and wasteful. It's shocking people do this because they don't like the taste of their tap water. Just purify it if you hate it that much? Also, the taste of any water pretty much disappears once you get used to it, so the thought of someone hating tap water is just absurd.

People do buy these things, so clearly there must be reasons for doing so. Point is, are they good reasons? And are they real reasons, or have they been put there by some big (and yes, evil) corporation?

The BBC did a wonderfully subversive 3-part documentary a few years ago called "The foods that make billions", which investigates in some depth the way people's tastes have been shaped to accept anything the food industry comes up with (no matter how disgusting in concept). Well worth tracking down on YouTube or whatever (particularly the episode about yoghurt, which I found grimly hilarious).

* Why would anyone want roasted grain coated in sugar as the first thing you eat each day?*

IKR? The tub of Ben and Jerry's Chunky Monkey is right there! And you don't have to pour the milk!

>Why would anyone buy bottled water when it comes practically free from the tap?

A question I often ask myself because the tap water in my house is literally the stuff they put in the bottles (mountain spring fresh etc). And yet the entire family drinks bottled water hauled at great carbon footprint via Costco, probably bottled in California which is 1200 miles away.

My best answer is that if I were to lay down the law and mandate everyone turn on the tap to get their water[1], I'd be viewed as the cook tinfoil hat Dad everyone hates.

How the water-industrial-complex arranged for that to be the state of play is a very intriguing question I think.

[1]Sometimes people prefer bottled water to tap only because they store the bottles in the fridge. Cold water to some people tastes better, but if you ran a blind test where you took their tap water, put it in bottles and chilled them, they can't tell the difference. This does not explain things in my house however because the bottles are kept at room temp.

> I'd be viewed as the cook tinfoil hat Dad everyone hates.

Maybe it's just a matter of rebranding yourself as the nature-loving, environmentally-conscious Dad who wants to keep the world plastic-free for your children :-)

> Why would anyone buy bottled water when it comes practically free from the tap?

You're in a place where tap water is not safe to drink and don't have a way to boil it. You live in a place where tap water is safe to drink, but tastes of sulfur. You're traveling and will want water in the next N hours. ...

It does not sound like you are answering in good faith. A more considerate — and basically obvious — interpretation of "when [water] comes free from the tap" is that the writer meant potable water.

Sure, there are many regions where potable water is difficult to attain, and there _are_ reasons to bottle water, but your contributions are disingenuously oblique.

I'm not even taking about places where potable water is not available. In North of Iceland you drink, eat, and bathe in sulfur favoured water. It's perfectly fine. But it's great to buy a bottled one from time to time.

How many people in the US live somewhere the tap water is unsafe. How many people on the US drink tap water. That second circle is much larger. So why do people drink bottled water?

> Why would anyone buy branded toothpaste when the chemically-identical supermarket version is half the price?

Doesn't really matter, they are both manufactured and sold by the same company, at the same facility. The difference is just to provide the illusion of choice (and the price difference is usually much smaller, just enough to trigger a response in a certain common kind of consumer.)

Some of the products do have reasons for existing, the brand versions might not be superior.

Bottled water: Because you don't always have a tap on hand and you don't always bring a water bottle from home. Some regions doesn't have water that can be consumed directly from the tap for sanitary reasons.

Hydrogenated vegetable oil: Because of lactose intolerance, and because liquid vegetable oil wouldn't be useful in the situation.

There are massive economies of scale in ingredient sourcing, supply chain management, production, marketing, advertising and product placement with very high minimum efficient scales for global consumer goods products.

It is inevitable that the global consumer goods industry consolidates into a handful of large groups as has happened, and the outcome is lower prices to consumers.

> It is inevitable that the global consumer goods industry consolidates

CPG companies are distribution and marketing powerhouses. They rose with supermarkets and mass media. The rise of voice-based ordering, as well as shops like Amazon, fundamentally threatens their business model.

Indeed, the same factors that led to their success (global supply chains, standard ingredients and manufacturing processes) eventually could make the irrelevant, as the brands become irrelevant.

> ...and the outcome is lower prices to consumers.

Not totally sold on that part.

Oh, it does, by lowering the production cost of the products, which allows competition to drive prices lower.

Unless, of course, the market turns into a monopoly. But even in oligopoly markets (such as the cola/soda) there is still plenty of choice, especially around lower cost products and with the rise of white-label/home-brand products.

If the prices were higher, it would be trivial for local businesses to displace them in stores.

Just the threat that a big company has the capacity to lower prices drastically can keep small companies from entering a market.

In some cases, yes, but take a look at your local supermarket and see how many new brands not owned by the large ones popped up in the past few years.

You can also look at how much the large ones are buying local new brands (such as Blue Bottle). Tastes change, and small local companies are a great way for the big ones to figure out which new products work.

Not really, given that there can be high barriers to entry in getting on store shelves in the first place.

Not really, I've seen many grocery stores have sections dedicated specifically to local stuff because of the whole 'local' movement.

It's just a start. They have a more powerful grasp on the world supply of food than the joint grasp of Google, Microsoft, and Apple on the computing world.

You'd be surprised how many "artisan", "organic", and "fair-trade" brands they own, too.

The full list of their brands did not fit in the main Wikipedia article, so they had to create a separate one: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Unilever_brands.

> You'd be surprised how many "artisan", "organic", and "fair-trade" brands they own, too.

I get the quotes on "artisan," but why put them around two terms with very clear definitions?

Fair trade: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_trade

Organic: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Organic_certification

From the top of your organic link: "Requirements vary from country to country". And the fair trade article also lists concerns with over-certification and validation consistency.

To pretend they are very clear definitions when applied to products is wrong.

I loosely assumed it was because they don't have much faith in them actually being organic or fair-trade.

The other posts' links are informative, but this graphic is my favorite representation of how many sub-brands are owned by massive parents: https://i.huffpost.com/gen/585370/original.jpg

Oh that's nothing.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Nestl%C3%A9_brands

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Procter_%26_Gamble_bra...

(includes kraft + mondelez on the page)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Kraft_brands

The surprise factor here for me was the market variety, not the mere number of brands. I knew about Kraft and Nestle making lots of edibles I see around, but never would I have guessed that the same companies would make soap and fragrances etc. (But maybe if I went through the full list of Kraft and Nestle I'd find the same surprise there, I have no idea... these lists are definitely long. :P)

These companies see all of these goods as being part of the same category: https://www.investopedia.com/terms/f/fastmoving-consumer-goo... Fast-Moving Consumer Goods (FMCG)

> These are consumer goods products that sell quickly at relatively low cost – items such as milk, gum, fruit and vegetables, toilet paper, soda, beer and over-the-counter drugs like aspirin.

That's what I figured after I saw the list too, but (from my naive standpoint, knowing nothing about this stuff) it seems a bit... weird? Shouldn't you enter a new product market where you can apply the production efficiencies you've already established in another market? It seems weird deciding what to produce based on how fast the product would be consumed, otherwise e.g. gasoline would also get lumped into this category (modulo being a bit more expensive), and yet I really wouldn't expect an oil company to have much more to bring to the table of ketchup-making than an apparel company (or whatever).

The synergy lies in sales and marketing, not production.

They've amassed their portfolio by slowly buying up local producers and their brands, and keeping the production facilities. There might be some synergy to be had by letting former separate production facilities learn from each other.

However, almost all of their products are sold in grocery stores, and there has to be enormous efficiencies there by newly acquired brands getting into a large existing distribution network. Instead of each product being distributed and marketed separately, Unilever can simply dump a couple of pallets of all their goods at once, and they can easily introduce new products by just dumping it on the grocery stores complete with marketing materials as part of a normal delivery.

> Instead of each product being distributed and marketed separately, Unilever can simply dump a couple of pallets of all their goods at once, and they can easily introduce new products by just dumping it on the grocery stores complete with marketing materials as part of a normal delivery.

Is that how it works? I always assumed grocery stores give shelf space to what they themselves pick, not "whatever you multinational corps want us to advertise today". (?)

Depends on the grocery store and how large of a player it is, and how well it thinks it can anticipate consumer demand, and cross-market across the entire store, etc. Both the distributor and the grocery stores have sales figures for the products, per-store, so it's a matter of who is best at crunching the numbers.

When I used to live in Stockholm, my closest grocery store was one of the big two chains in Sweden, and they had "outsourced" part of their shelf re-stocking to the distributors, so if you went there in the mornings, you could have one or two people from a big bread producer/distributor restocking half the bread section, and you'd have someone from a different producer/distributor doing half the candy section (probably someone from Mondelez). I don't know this for sure, but I would bet that the distributor had a lot of leeway on how to restock the shelves using their own sales data.

Right now, my local Safeway has a bunch of shelves of deli products, but it's all Boar's Head products. Five bucks says that Boar's Head is choosing how to stock those shelves, and not Safeway. They also sometimes have a little floor display promoting new products from Boar's Head, that's also something that the local Safeway didn't do, they were just served up with some ready-to-go marketing, and they're okaying it.

Also, you have to keep in mind the relative size of the players.

If the grocery store is small, and Unilever, for example, is responsible for 10% of the inventory, but they're not happy with what the store is doing, it's probably really easy for them to say "Our delivery trucks only come every other week now, because you're not profitable enough. But, hey, if you let us decide what you should stock, the trucks will be there exactly when you need them."

Thee term you should know is "slotting fees":

https://www.vox.com/2016/11/22/13707022/grocery-store-slotti...

It's not just grocery stores, it's a lot of retail. Manufacturers of some products literally rent shelf space and provide the product for those shelves. The store doesn't own the product, the manufacturer does. The store just takes a cut of the sale price, provides checkout services, space, attracts customers, etc.

One of the most obvious places this happens is at Home Depot. The tools department is almost entirely manufacturer-rented. If you buy a drill or such and take it apart you'll find that the anti-theft magnetostrictive tag is actually inside the tool, not just stuck on the box!

You are learning a lot of things today!

Consider it as an investment portfolio. It's not necessarily about leveraging experience across brands (although that's definitely helpful) as much as it is about investing in one kind of investment (product) which behaves in a certain way.

Huh. So you're saying I should see them as shareholders rather than normal companies?

Mandatory from a few years ago:

https://assets.goodstatic.com/s3/magazine/assets/560378/orig...

Update: also very informative Banks Roadmap:

https://motherjones.com/files/images/big-bank-theory-chart-l...

Yeah, you should check this out:

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article36743.htm

I've seen an info-graphic of who owns what and it's crazy

$9.5 billion out of $52 billion in revenue.

less than $1 billion in research.

$13 billion in SG&A.

I mean, I get what you’re going for here, but how much do we need to spend on research into better soap, paper towels, and ice cream?

If their yearly "new and improved" marketing is to be believed then we are a long way from perfecting any of those products.

That’s why a small deodorant costs $7 and not $2.

one more to the list: Reckitt Benckiser

The penny drops!