Is it really inflation, or are greedy food companies jacking up prices?

It has been — can it be? — more than 40 years since the last meaningful round of inflation led to a grocery-store curiosity: Plain white labels with black block lettering announcing the contents as simply “cola” or “chili.”

Every aisle had its national brands like Kraft and Del Monte, but there, standing alongside like some pale, unshakable ghost were these white-labeled products known as generic. While the name brands had colorful labels with large green men standing in a vegetable garden and grinning tigers with red bandanas, generic products reveled in their simplicity.

The message was clear — without big budgets for package designers, artists and ad campaigns, these generic products had far less overhead and could be sold at considerable discount.

They had two main characteristics, they were real cheap and real bad. The ketchup, for example would come out in a pale and thin red stream, resembling the sink after you’d cut yourself shaving.

No one really knew where these generic products came from, although they had a vaguely Eastern Bloc look to them, like what housewives were buying at that very moment in Albania.

(Speaking of generic, the first supermarket I recall my parents shopping at was called “Acme” which, as a small, cartoon-watching child, was where I assumed the Coyote and Road Runner shopped.)

There was a class element attached to generics, obviously. You didn’t want to be That Family whose cart was filled with products associated with poverty. But there was more to it. At the time, commercial brands still represented some form of social compact: National brands could be trusted. This was partly due to perceived quality, but not entirely.

National brands were on your side. The world could be falling apart around you, but you yourself were not going to be swept away in the chaos, not if Betty Crocker had anything to do with it. If you could open up the cupboard and see Uncle Ben, you still felt grounded, somehow.

I seem to remember some sort of counterculture popularity briefly enjoyed by generics. What passed as hippies in the early ’80s would buy them as a thumb in the eye of the establishment. National brands were a rip-off purchased robotically by unthinking fools. So in defiance they would swallow green beans the color of plankton in the name of sticking it to the man.

I bring this up because generic products are back under the more marketable names of “private label” or “store brand.” The labels are in color and have minimalistic artwork, usually an unenhanced image of the product within and the off-brand name in some unintimidating, semi-cursive font.

Along with the customers who buy them, these products feed the storyline that the big food processors greedily jacked up the price of their products under the guise of inflation, and have kept prices high even as inflation has come down and supply-chain issues have receded.

But the biggest difference from the white labels of old is in product quality.

“Retailers, which have dumped the term ‘generic,’ insist that the quality of the private-label foods and beverages has improved substantially,” The New York Times writes. “Social media platforms like TikTok and Reddit are filled with young people hyping their favorite store brand foods at Aldi and Trader Joe’s.”

Well, if TikTok says it’s OK …

Subsequently, these store brands are eating into the big guys’ market share. “Big brands, in response, are already starting to offer small sale prices on certain foods, like salty snacks,” says the Times.

I know, I know — what the world needs, cheap Doritos. But let’s be real; there’s no reason why some foodstuffs cost so much. You think about it, the difference between the best egg noodle you’ve ever eaten and the worst is not exactly a yawning chasm.

So if I see a product labeled “Bill’s Egg Noodles,” yeah, I’ll take a chance. If Bill can take down Conagra, more power to him.

Tim Rowland is a Herald-Mail columnist.

This article originally appeared on The Herald-Mail: Generics give a hint that inflation-era prices are corporate greed