Store brands gaining share in fast-growing U.S. retail channels
New York-based Nielsen has released its latest sales and market share statistics, which show that store brands are gaining market share against the big national brands in America’s fastest-growing retail channels, according to the Private Label Manufacturers Association (PLMA).
For the 52 week period ending Dec. 24, 2016, retailers’ brands strongly outperformed the national brands in the rapidly growing mass merchandiser segment of Nielsen’s total outlets database, which includes Walmart and Target as well as some warehouse clubs and dollar store chains.
Private label dollar volume in the mass merchandiser/club/dollar store segment climbed 4.4 percent to $49.6 billion, resulting in a 0.5 point market share gain to 16.6 percent.
A similar pattern emerged in regard to units, with private label advancing 4.2 percent compared to only 0.2 percent for the national brands. As a result, private label’s market share moved up 0.6 point to 19.7 percent.
These gains are especially important because the total channel sales for mass merchandisers, clubs and dollar stores are climbing at a much greater rate than in the supermarket channel, according to PLMA. Dollar volume sales for Nielsen’s all-retail-outlets-combined segment, which also includes drug chains, outpaced the supermarkets-only measure, increasing 0.8 percent compared to barely 0.1 percent growth for supermarkets. Store brands’ market share declined in the slow-growth supermarket channel — measured at 18.4 percent dollar share and 22.3 percent unit share — as well as in Nielsen’s all-outlets- combined sector, PLMA stated.
But the data clearly indicate that, separate from the adverse impact of supermarket numbers dragging down the overall private label results, market shares for retailer brands in the other outlets have experienced solid gains at the expense of national brands, PLMA stated.
Private label’s success in mass merchandisers and other non-supermarket channels is also an important factor when estimating the total size of the private label market in the United States. While Nielsen reports total private label sales for 2016 at $118 billion, these results do not include sales from some of the “biggest and best store brands retailers in the country” such as Costco, Aldi, and Trader Joe’s, PLMA said. Estimates of their private label sales would add $35 billion to the total and push the total U.S. private label market to more than $150 billion.