Rather interestingly generics are a huge profit maker for supermarkets -- up to 10x the profit compared to selling name brands! Aldi has something like 97% generics in their stock; no wonder Costco/Safeway et al are pressing so hard to encourage generic sales (and creating their own "name brands" to make generics more palatable). The quality is really all over the place -- as mentioned earlier in this thread, some brands have good/bad products even in the same item, just different flavours. Things like great 4 cheese pizza at Safeway and terrible spinach pizza under the same branding. I suppose that is the big drawback of generics: you cannot trust the branding, or product quality over time. Each lot can vary (as they change the plant of manufacture).