Recently, while shopping at supermarkets, have you noticed a change? The best shelf positions are no longer occupied by Procter & Gamble, Master Kong, Nongfu Spring, or Coca-Cola. The main aisle, at eye level, is now filled with uniform white-label packaging: retailers' own private-label products.
These products have a more accurate name: white-label goods.
Also known as private label: products that retailers plan, price, and control the supply chain for, under their own trademark.
In the past, white-label was synonymous with low-end and cheap. Now, it's a sign of shelf upgrade. Sam's Member's Mark, Hema's Daily Fresh, Costco's Kirkland. The bottle of water or bag of nuts you buy might no longer be from a branded manufacturer.
This trend has already gone far and is accelerating.
Retailer White-Label: Who Can Be Copied and Who Can't?
White-label expansion doesn't happen uniformly; it differentiates by category, showing two distinct fates:
First: Categories already monopolized by consumer mindshare—retailers simply cannot replicate them.
For Moutai Feitian, consumer recognition is built over decades. White-label can copy the label on the bottle, but not the weight of the word "Feitian" in consumers' minds.
Master Kong's Braised Beef Noodles, Master Kong's Sauced Pickled Cabbage, Coca-Cola, etc.—these categories have formed consumer "conditioned reflexes." No matter how cheap the retailer's white-label is, consumers will still choose the brand.
The ultimate goal of competition has always been to capture consumer mindshare. The shelf belongs to the retailer, but the mindshare belongs to the brand itself.
Second: Categories without strong mindshare monopoly—white-label is rapidly penetrating.
For tissue paper, basic condiments, bottled water, etc., consumer-perceived differences are extremely low, and quality standardization is extremely high. When white-label lowers prices, consumers have no reason to pay more for branded goods.
Middle brands with many SKUs but no core hero product are the first to be cleared out.
Because these brands have no place in consumers' minds, when retailers remove them, even consumers won't notice.
Why Can Some Retailers Succeed with White-Label While Others Die Faster?
The core is two things: brand trust enables white-label; quality control system allows white-label to survive.
First, consumers' obsession with brands is loosening, but what consumers trust is never the word "white-label" but the retailer's name.
Three years ago, when you went to the supermarket to buy water, you reached for Nongfu Spring because you trusted the red label on the bottle. Now, when Sam's Member's Mark and Nongfu Spring are on the same shelf, consumers are willing to pick up Sam's private label: because they trust Sam's, not because of the concept of "white-label."
This is why Sam's, Pangdonglai, and Hema can succeed, while many small and medium retailers' white-label products have poor sales.
Second, without brand trust and quality control, doing white-label will only lead to faster death.
The reason is simple: when a consumer picks up a bottle of water with no name, they are betting on the retailer's reputation. If the reputation is poor and quality is unstable, that bottle of water becomes a "landmine." One bad experience leads to lifelong abandonment. The collapse of a certain company's private label is the inevitable result of lacking a quality control system.
Retailer White-Label and Platform White-Label
Are Essentially the Same Thing
At this point, I must point out a reality that many brand owners haven't yet seen clearly.
It's not just supermarkets doing white-label. E-commerce platforms, live-streaming platforms, content platforms—all are doing the same thing: de-branding.
Douyin, Taobao, Pinduoduo—on the surface, they all talk about "helping merchants grow." But the platform's core ambition is only one: control transactions.
Because only by making transactions increasingly dependent on the platform can the platform continue to take commissions, sell ads, and control traffic distribution.
So, platforms will definitely strengthen one thing: de-branding.
Why? Because once a brand becomes too strong, it will break away from the platform. Users will actively search for it, buy it across platforms, and bypass the platform for direct transactions. This is what platforms least want to see.
In contrast, platforms prefer: high-ad-spend merchants, high-conversion white-label, and fast transactions.
Platforms don't need great brands; they only need "puppets" that depend on them the most.
Many brand owners don't realize that even if they do billions in GMV annually, they are essentially just a string of "product numbers" on the platform's assembly line.
The Biggest Illusion in the Consumer Industry
Treating GMV as an Asset
The most dangerous companies today are like this:
On the surface, they are brands, but in reality, consumers don't actively seek them out; without platform traffic, they can't sell; they have no stable user relationships, no brand spirit, and no long-term recognition.
The only thing they know how to do is "sell goods according to platform rules."
Unknowingly, they have degenerated from "brand companies" to "platform suppliers."
GMV is not brand equity.
Platforms can give you traffic, orders, and exposure, but they can never give you true user assets. You sell billions a year, but users don't remember you, don't search for you, don't repurchase from you.
Users haven't fallen in love with you; they just made a brief purchase in the emotions created by the platform.
Many companies mistake "GMV growth" for "brand success," which is the biggest illusion in the consumer industry today.
The entire industry is entering a dangerous negative cycle:
Platforms continuously compress profits, merchants continuously lower quality, brands continuously lose personality, and consumers continuously lose loyalty.
How Did Sam's Do It?
When talking about white-label, Sam's is unavoidable.
Sam's Club's core success formula, I summarize in one sentence:
Streamline SKUs, scale procurement, concentrate resources on high-repurchase items, and build deep consumer recognition with cost-effective hero products.
Sam's Member's Mark accounts for over 30% of total sales, with 13 billion-level single products. When consumers walk into Sam's and buy Swiss rolls, roast chicken, or beef rolls, it's not because of a brand, but because Sam's has chosen for them, and they trust Sam's selection.
This leads to a result: consumers shopping at Sam's don't care much about brands but focus more on the quality of the products themselves, with high-frequency repurchase of a few fixed items.
Pangdonglai is also following the same path.
Pangdonglai's private label: in 2022, sales were 75 million yuan; by 2025, they reached 6 billion yuan, an 80-fold increase in three years. Four single products exceeded 100 million in sales. DL craft beer is less than 3 yuan per can, with quality comparable to products priced at 10-15 yuan on the market, and consumer repurchase rate exceeds 60%.
In the end, the core of white-label success is not the product itself, but the retailer's trust endorsement. Without trust, white-label is nothing.
Do Brand Owners Still Have a Chance?
Yes. But the window is narrowing.
Opportunities lie in two directions:
Direction One: Build a true consumer mindshare barrier.
White-label cannot replace Moutai because consumers' emotional connection and identity recognition with Moutai have been built over decades. White-label cannot replace Coca-Cola because consumers' memory of its taste is etched into daily life.
Does your brand occupy such a position in consumers' minds? Not the position on the shelf, but the one in their heads.
Direction Two: Become an "irreplaceable" for retailers.
If your product has sufficient differentiation and consumers buy it by name, retailers cannot replace you with white-label. Think clearly about where your irreplaceability lies—that's more important than adding more SKUs.
Finally, one thing:
This round of "de-branding" will not stop, nor will it drown everyone at once.
It will penetrate along categories, differentiate along channels, and unfold gradually along the gradient of brand capability. The first to exit will be those middle brands that have neither scale advantages nor differentiation capabilities.
And those brands that have already occupied "top-of-mind" in consumers' minds have moats deeper than most people think.
Many people have always believed that platforms and retailers have eliminated brands.
But I increasingly feel that what they truly eliminate is never brands.
Rather, it's those companies that wear the cloak of a brand but have never truly become a brand.
The shelf belongs to the retailer, but mindshare is your own.
Where is your product now?