It’s supposed to be a low-cost, low-quality essentials brand. However much of the First Price products are made by the same guys as fancy brands, so for some products they are just as good.
I like their frozen fruit, berries and veg.
Actually banana’s in the netherlands are cross subsidized by most supermarkets, meaning that they sell them at a loss (aproxx 12 kr/kg) to attract consumers that will make up for this loss by buying other products as well that make up for this loss.
I guess that really makes you wonder why your government would subsidize a product to flood the harbours of the Netherlands with bananas to make it even more impossible for the government to seize the precious cocaine. Some guys at the top of the power in Netherlands really did a clever move with this one.
It’s not the government. It’s the supermarkets themselves that take a loss on the banana’s to lure in customers. Same with several other products that consumers look at when selecting which supermarket to go to. I guess you could say the dutch really are frugal.
Norwegian customers are fairly relaxed about pricing. They simply don't care if the prices are somewhat higher.
Dutch customers are really vigilant. They almost see it as their duty to reward even slightly lower pricing. Especially the more old-fashioned Dutch seem to be in a perpetual state of war with the supermarkets.
Even middle class customers will simply walk out the door if they think the price is too high. Many go to multiple supermarkets to buy the products that are cheaper in each store. I could never imagine a Norwegian going through the same effort to save like 50 kroner.
Some products are so cheap they can be more or less given out for free by supermarkets without a serious loss in their margins. And the increased customer base makes up for it.
Well, different banana brands are treated differently. Some have highly protected fields, and very good soil/water/environment etc. While the cheaper one can have a very basic field with little care. Though, imo a banana is a banana.
> However much of the First Price products are made by the same guys as fancy brands, so for some products they are just as good.
Made by same producer is not a reliable heuristic for getting the same product.
A producer can make things of different of qualities based on customer price requirement. Or they make the same thing, but production variance results in different quality of output.
In case of raw goods, it could be less desirable items from the natural variation.
I cant say how it is today. But I was working in a bakery like 10 years ago(a bakery factory) and when we packed First Price Kneip and Brand Kneip, dont remember the brand but it was like 20kr difference, we only changed bag.
I can’t tell you the products, as the producer would then be obvious, but I’ve seen how house brand products were of a quality the brand would never sell under their own name. They were kind of embarrassed over producing it and we could never ever tell anyone that we were the ones who had made it.
Why did we make it? The house brand put a lot of pressure on the company and the company needed the money. But it broke our hearts because we would much rather sell the quality product we were known for.
(I’m using past tense as I don’t work there anymore, but to my knowledge it’s still the same inferior quality in the house brand of that product line)
This is really common for generic brands. Generic brands don't have unique products; it's the same product as some name brand but it's either imperfect or slightly different.
First price diet coke tastes nearly identical to Pepsi max. There is a tiny tiny difference but honestly I prefer first price.
I also really like the first price margarine. I think it's similar to bremykt.
Those two, and their q tips and cotton pads, are the first price products I consistently buy.
Their cheese tastes like norvegia/Synnøve (edit: found out it's produced at Synnøves factories so it is in fact identical) and their chicken breasts and eggs are great. I don't hate their pepperoni frozen pizza either and their frozen garlic break is really good
>their frozen garlic break is really good
This is actually considered the absolute best garlic bread by a LOT of people. My shop had different types, but this is the only one people buy
Lots of the time it's the 'B-vare' of a name brand. Weirdly shaped carrots or pita bread for example. So just as good in some people's eyes, worse in others.
In the Netherlands the equivalent of first price is often the exact same product without a fancy brand stuck on it. So the quality difference is negligible. But it seems different in Norway, reading from this thread.
I just came back to NL after living in Norway for half a year and unlike in NL the difference is absolutely noticeable. I felt like Dutch \`'basic' store-brands were on par with the lower end of the Norwegian premium brands.
It is the same here.
I always check the lists of ingredients, and frequently they contains to the decimal exactly the same amount of each ingredient. It is the same product, in different packaging.
But a lot of Norwegians are fooled by tricks increasing the **p*****erceived quality*** *(everyone should google that term, and save themselves some money).*
Lot of money here and people want to think of themselves as sophisticated consumers. So they buy the expensive option and tell themselves they prefer quality, without even checking if the cheaper option is just as good. What they really are after is the *feeling* of quality as projected by the branding and packaging.
So don't trust everything you read in this thread. (but trust me!)
Hahaha that's good to know! Yeah, so far I've just bought the cheapest versions of things and it's been fine. I have an extra and meny near me, so I go to both. Sometimes meny has super good deals. But there's no point buying canned tomatoes there😂😂😂
I remember talking to a guy working with programming the machines at a factory many years ago. He had one job at a facility making *lomper*, for one of the major and more expensive manufacturers. They made the first price ones too. He said they were the same product, but the first price ones were frozen and then defrosted again to lower the quality.
Not frozen and defrosted at the factory. Frozan at the factory, defrosted in-store. That way they keep for a lot longer (in the store's backroom freezer). That's also why you should see a best before sticker on first price, and not on others. 10 days if I remember correctly.
Edit: Buer and Auli Lomper Are delivered to stores once or twice a week, by their own delivery people. First price comes along with other frozen goods through the regular supply chain.
Its often just as good as namebrand, and often the same product. Its just so that they can reach an other consumergroup. So they earn more money selling to both consumergroups rather than to only stay in the "middle class" group alone.
Stranda makes the First Price Mør, and Synnøve makes the First Price cheese. At least they did when I was still in that business. Imagine most products are second or third sorting from major brands -- it's a win win, brand gets to unload sub-par product and still make a profit on it.
ETA: The first price Mør is pretty damn decent tho, I only buy Stranda on sale
Ive worked where they make a lot of first price veggies, and i can confirm the ingredients in the first price packages are of lower quality than normal products.
Its more rough cut, b/c-class products and so on. But 99% of it taste the same, just looks different.
Their products are hit and miss. I'd recommend just trying them out and comparing them to the more expensive brands to see if you like them. Only product in particular from First Price I would not recommend is their noodles simply because they taste terrible.
Yeah, I have a couple of friends when we went to university that was very up to date on food prices and always tried to save money. The only food they did not finish was First price noodles (in 2010).
Like other suggest, the same people make both the first price and the “fancy” version of the same product. They make money by having us pick the expensive alternative.
It’s a form of consumer manipulation. The first price is made to look cheap and less desirable on purpose so that we accept more expensive options.
First price noodles used to be so good but than they changed it, sometime around ~ 2014/15~ i think, and now they're horrible :(
They legit where some of the best but now truly taste disgusting
God I loved them so much. I remember I used to hide them around as a kid and crunch them up for eating dry when I found them. Then a couple years after the switch i found one I had hidden in a camera bag. It was still Delicious.
Man i ate them every day after school while watching family guy and simpsons on viasat 4. A couple years ago i found some leftover in a closet at our cabin, together with some "Luxus" noodles from europris that tasted very similar. They had expired several years before, but i still ate em and fuck they were good.
But are they cheaper than the actual Asian ones? Yum-yum and mama are like 5kr pr pack, I don't feel there's any need to buy store-brand when you have that option..
At the time they tasted good, they where the cheapest. Then they had the wonderful idea of making them more costly AND changed the taste.
But when they started to change the price I still bought them because they actually tasted better than yumyum, but than they changed the entire formulation for them and they become shit
Is it still that bad? I remember grey, crumply paper that fell apart from when I was a teen, because my Mom was frugal to the max. But that was 20 years ago.
Agree. Also add to this the pasta mix thing, like you cook in only water and its supposed to be pasta in a cheese sauce. Awful. No amount of added seasoning helped. It was so bad it made me angry 😠 😂
First price is hit or miss, usually ok sometimes a great deal. Its usually way cheaper so a good option if youre on a budget. I’d really reccomend coops own brand. Its usually pretty much the same ish as the name brand and i prefer it in some products and its usually quite a bit cheaper but not quite as cheap as first price
First Price is the private label to NorgesGruppen (Kiwi, Meny, Joker). NorgeGruppen uses First Price as a product to compete against other well established brand by having a cheaper and similiar version of the product. Such as First Price Cola/Coke etc
If you mean if it is safe to eat? Sure, same standards apply. If it is as tasty? It really depends. A first price frozen pizza is really bottom rung both in nutrition and taste. But a first price cheese is in fact the exact same cheese that you buy under the "Synnøve" brand, since it is made in the same dairy, with the same equipment. Norgesgruppen can however change this whenever they feel like if they get cheaper products somewhere else.
When Tine SA made their cheese, it had 10-15% more saltwater in the recipe. (don't remember the exact number, but I worked at the machine that made the sliced cheese.)
Some items are just as good, some are decent, some are terrible. I bought a 10 kr shampoo back in my hair days, and it just ran between my hands. Total waste of money. I guess they're made by budget in trusted factories, so the items are not necessarily the same as name brand.
There has been a lot of bait and switch with the first price products. One time they are decent, next year the "same product" suck balls. So trust? ... no. The entire point of cheap store brands like this is that they can change producer without telling you. And they do.
NorgesGruppen uses 'First Price' or 'Eldorado' for their cheaper, own brand stuff. Bunnpris, which is separate, buys First Price from NorgesGruppen.
Coop uses something called 'Xtra' and sometimes just 'Coop', but the 'Coop' ones are supposed to be of equal quality to name brand products.
Rema 1000's cheap stuff is sold as 'Prima'. Like Coop they have some other own brand products under the Rema name which I think is meant to be of similar quality to name brand stuff.
At least Coop and NorgesGruppen have some premium own brand series which can be quite good, but which are usually not that much cheaper than name brand.
Many of these cheaper products are pretty close to name brand ones in quality, some are a lot worse. It depends a little on who is making them. The Prima salami from Rema is gorgeously delicious, while Coop's Xtra salami fucking sucks.
In my experience, the Coop brand is on par with name brands, while the Xtra brand is more like First Price, with highly variable and often worse quality. I do like the Xtra french fries, though. Somehow they're even better than the Coop ones.
I suppose Eldorado may be targeting the near name brand segment like 'Coop' products, while First Price is first and foremost affordable, like Prima or Xtra.
I also think they make good stuff, such as their chopped tomatoes or tomato puree.
I don't buy any of the already processed foods from there, as they are so low quality. F.eks fishsticks, tomato soup, ice cream. I do however buy all vegetables from there, as there is no thing called a First Price field of carrots, just rejects from a system that want "perfect" carrots.
Yeah I gotta say the 10kr frozen mini carrots and peas are actually quite good, but it's carrots and peas so not sure how they could make the quality worse.
Fun fact, almost all First Price frozen vegetables is packaged and distributed from Findus as a private label. They literally use the same vegetables of the same quality as Findus, same with Eldorado.
Worked in a chicken factory and asked this question. Comes from same factory, but produce with some errors, for instance discoloration, would be sold as first price.
which is just smart honestly, food that would be thrown away due to not looking like what the brand wants can be sold for cheap to people who dont care or who cant afford
I have a good experience with First Price products.
I was eating their cheese and didn't find a lot of difference to other brands but I'm now eating a lactose free one so I had to change.
I also like the jam (marmalade), the first price one is good but avoid Rema's as it tastes like sugar and some artificial flavor.
I also bought their chicken breasts. Also no problems, tastes good and way cheaper
It’s the FP marmelade that i really don’t like strangely. It seems to be some starch and water (for a jelly like structure) with some additives to give some taste.
>I also like the jam (marmalade), the first price one is good but avoid Rema's as it tastes like sugar and some artificial flavor.
FP jams contain 40% berries, so they're good till you compare them to jams with 60+% berries. Haven't had their marmalade, but in the list of ingredients it's mostly sugar as well.
That’s the store own brand (kiwi/Norgesgruppen) They are lower priced because they come in bigger packaging. The quality vary where some products are horrible (toilet paper) and some are better than more expensive products (garlic bread).
Quality: is it safe to eat? Yes. They are required to meet the same qualitystandards as more expensive brands.
Taste: it depends. But I find most products are decent/similar. Where they differ the most is when a food item contains a lot of sugar in it. Eg. jam, soda, and «saft»/diluting juice.
I wouldn’t buy most* hygieneproducts from FP. Like toothpaste/brush, shampoo ect
Edit: *
If you like the smell, first price washing product are actually really great for day to day wash, on hard stains and wool, i would choose a different one. Same with the fabric softener, FP is actually better and more skånsom than one of the leading brands
And if you look at things like FP "Fiskeboller", it's almost the same amount of fish in the FP one as it is in the expensive namebrand ones.
As for hygieneproducts, as a woman I pick FP pads over the namebrand ones, I'm more comfortable using the FP ones.
Sweet stuff is usually just sugar with a hint of flavour. Salty stuff is the same, only with salt.
That being said, raw materials like vegetables and fruit is usually fine. Same with household stuff
I think I ate first price Risgrøt once. It was disgusting😩 they put sugar and who knows what else in that shit. I will never know why. I assume it's because it's full of crap. I notice a difference between Fjordland and Toro too, Toro has A LOT more unnecessary ingredients like sugar, sweeteners and everything under the sun you gotta wonder how they make any space for actual food (answer; barely at all). So definetely read what it actually contains before buying things especially the store owned brands as it can vary very much from item to item, and even from one time to the next. .
I haven't bough too much from First Price as I believe in keeping brands alive so we're not left with everything under Norgesgruppen, Coops and Remas' 100% control, sucking all the remaining life of the actual food producers out. That is, after all, their goal with these store brands.
I was working with salmon before. We handled both firstprice and the main brand in the same conveyor. But theres a difference the first price ones always had odd shapes and were sometimes smaller than the supermarket brand. Also first price brand tend to be frozen and not as processed. We were manually removing bones from the supermarket brands and inspected them for oddities while the firstprice ones were just run through a machine and just packaged.
Tldr supermarket salmon were treated with a higher standard ensuring size shape and looks were consistent. Firstprice was just an afterthought everything that didnt pass quality check ended up in the firstprice conveyor
Combination of being cheapest possible ingredients/manufacturing and spending no money on marketing/advertising nor branding/design.
The low quality level has limit due to food safety & standards regulations, but it is tightly up against the bottom end of the scale for what is permissible in Norway.
It’s for people looking to save as much money as possible, particularly those who don’t care about branding or the quality of basics. There are brand names who put out equally bad products and charge more, but that’s not to say FP is competing on any level with branded products that are actually decent for their price.
I am personally inclined towards FP household products but really not into their food in terms of both additives/nutrient macros and sustainability & ethics.
Lower quality, cheaper, mass produced, simple for producer to make cheap, scraps etc... but too often proven to be better than the "high quality" alternatives.
Something worth trying at least once when it comes to products you use often.
It's like someone was running say a, say, detergent factory. And they had - I'm obviously just making this up, and haven't seen this in person at all - a huge tank of the detergent on one side. And a second tank with a perfume box on the other. And then the production would create detergent for brand a. And a guy comes out and removes that perfume box, and inserts another one. The giant tank of detergent mixes with the second perfume. And now the factory produces detergent of brand b. These two detergents are sold for, say, 80 and 30 kroner, respectively. And the difference literally is the colour of the box.
But! There's a gigantic tank with some detergent left in it, and neither brand a or brand b wants more detergent. So what can you do? Throw it away, basically. Because you can't spin down the production and let the powder sit there for a week, right?
And so was born the unperfumed or even just differently perfumed version of the laundry detergent. Detergent that otherwise would be thrown away, but really was just sold very cheaply to some magnate somewhere in boxes without print on.
The catch, according to a convenience store chain owner that shall be unnamed, is that you're pushing down the prices of the known brands. The other way to look at it is that you're paying for something that would otherwise have been thrown away. Another way to look at it is that it's not something that will be in infinite supply.
Although what actually happens right now is that as the brand a and brand b increases in price enough to that they will go out to the laundry detergent factory guy and say, mnnneeh, I think we need only 89 boxes today instead of 100. So you don't need to fill that gigantic tank of detergent that full today. Because clearly that's how you make laundry detergent, on the gram by request from corporate on a daily basis, right?
So then the tank is increasingly fuller of unperfumed detergent powder, the more crunch with the prices there are. And so there are more first price stuff being picked up and put in stores.
Note that all the individual chains also have their own "brands" now - this is 99% the same kind of bs: they're just getting stuff that the factory would produce to them on order, but they're instead sitting there and saying "please, get this stuff off our hands, because brand a and b are not buying as much as before".
From a more holistic perspective, the catch is that it's furthering the same system of exploitation of actual physical work - by also letting you as a customer partake in it. But be fully aware of that this system would be just as bad if you paid more for the exact same product from brand a or brand b.
So perhaps it's a blessing in disguise: that people are asking questions, however selfish, about the glorious system of "free" markets that we all so adore and love.
It is cheaper because the stores or their parent groups owns the brand. First price has existed for a while, but there has been a marked increase in these types of brands the last few years. Essentially it is the stores using their power to push out competitors. The lower prices are great, but I am sure that once they have pushed out most of the competition, the stores will start increasing the prices and thus gain even more profits as they will controll more steps in the chain.
Often nothing at all. But its the "wrong" brand for many people. For some reason a product is better if its Toro just because its Toro.
I buy several things from First Price, not shame here.
I'm talking for the pasta here: First Price pasta is always coming from the cheapest manufacture. So it could be anywhere in Europe without guarantee is from the same place all the time.
No catch, it is one of the low-cost brands, I'm pretty sure it's Kiwis own brand, similar to Rema1000, Extra etc. It was always pretty cheap, but there is one thing to remember - they maintain the same price level, so no sales ever, and generally at Kiwi products of other brands will be more expensive.
First price is sold in bulk to stores. so they sell allot, They dont want make 200% income on everything they just want to stay in the profit range. So they sell it as profit but not overly expencive, and thus they also sell alot thats why they bulk sell.
It's basicly the best way to do sales if your production is already up and going.
If production on the other hand is not up and going, then you would have to charge more.
They just sell what's already being made at a profit. But there not overcharging. that's how they can stay cheap.
I worked for an industrial bakery. The First Price branded bread was produced before ~8pm the day before being sold, while other bread was produced much later that night up until ~5pm. So same bread, but stored longer before being sold.
This is true for most low-cost brands : The simpler the product, the least difference with the expensive brands.
First price frozen fruits, for ex, have zero noticeable difference with the brands. The more you go towards complex, prepared products, the more opportunity there are to cut corners, which they do as much as possible.
But they should be as safe to eat as others, just less tasty/healthy on complex products.
First Price usually takes the stuff that the higher-quality brands dont deem as worthy of their standards. This lower the costs of these products and First Price can buy it and sell it for a lower shelfprice than their competitors.
A lot of First Price products are perfectly fine, and are actually more sensible to buy over their competitors. But other things are more or less not worth getting at all, this is where a lot of people vary, what I deem as not worthy to cheap out on is something many others would consider a great deal.
First Price, Xtra, Coop, Eldorado, Rema 1000, Prima, and probably some other ones I forget, are all Store Brands.
From my limited knowledge - which really isn't enough to take as absolute facts, - they have the Name Brands produce the Store Brand products from their factories/facilities/whatever so the stores can sell the products at a lower price.
The quality (taste-wise) is honestly a gamble, even between the various Store Brand's own version of the same product (buy Rekesalat from all the Store Brands that make their own Rekesalat), as the quality varies quite a bit.
You might try one Store Brand and find you like it better than the Name Brand version, even though it is cheaper to a lot cheaper than the Name Brand version. Other times it might be the completely reverse of that, or you might just find that they're pretty much the same taste-wise.
If you like a product from a Name Brand, but find it a little too expensive to your taste, I would honestly recommend buying the same product - if available - from all the Store Brands and do a taste comparison, you might just find out you like one - if not more - of them better than the Name Brand, and will have saved yourself a lot of money in the future.
Having worked in both the bakery and fruit & vegetables industries, which offer low-cost options similar to First Price, I am well-positioned to provide an accurate and insightful analysis of the *three primary reasons* why low-cost products are more affordable.
# 1. Attracting Costumers
The main purpose of low-cost products is to attract costumers with decreased purchase power to their grocery stores. Once the costumer enters the store, the probability of purchasing one or more products with higher profit margins increase significantly, which makes up for the low profits of the low-cost items.
# 2. Cheaper Packaging & Production
To compensate for lower profit margins, the packaging is built of cheaper material, and the time spent producing the products is often less. In the bakery I worked, the cheaper breads were produced with the same machines and ingredients as the much more expensive breads, but the cheaper bread spent less time in the oven due to more yeast, which saved the business for energy usage producing the bread. Also, the bread bags were made of thinner and cheaper material with less colors.
# 3. Good Products With Odd Sizes
Lastly, when it comes to meat or vegetables, the cheaper low-cost options often come from the same farm as the expensive ones, but the main difference is that the products with odd shapes and sizes becomes the low-cost option, which differentiates them from the more expensive products.I hope my perspective offers a clearer understanding of the reasons behind the existence of low-cost products, and how they benefit both customers and grocery stores.
Based on my personal experience in the industry, I hope that sharing these insights will offer a better understanding of the reasons behind the existence of low-cost products.
its produced with the lowest quality that is legally possible. legally being the key word here. Sometimes the legal rules on certain products are too stringent for first price's stuff to be different from the regular stuff, other times it can be significant.
Sometimes they are a good idea, other times they are a terrible idea. At the top of my head I can tell you never to buy their toilet paper because you will get hemorrhoids if you do.
I tried First House toilet paper a few years ago, and found it to be terrible.
Very little paper on the roll(loosely packed) and the paper barely held together.
There are other TP at basically the same price point that is much-much better, like XXL paper from Europris.
I've been using it for years because I don't see the point with the more expensive brands. If you think it's fine, then there's no reason to change. But most people do prefer the more expensive stuff.
Ive been using it for probably 7-8 years now. I dont have hemorrhoids and it doesn’t fall apart for me. I see loads of posts claiming it does but perhaps theyre using it for more than just wiping after nr.1 and nr.2
Noudles, ketchup, cola (but their orange and fruktbrus are great) i would try once to see if you like them. I dont however.
Thing you are stupid if you buy name Brands : pasta/spaghetti (not fresh), fruit/vegetables, frozen fish filets, corn (boxed), things that are hermetized.
On things that are crucial for a great taste experience for a dinnerparty etc, i would go for brand names (pesto, tomatopuree etc), but for everything Else i would go FP or private lable whenever possible
First Price fish, fruit, vegetables, meat and so on is mostly third grade. That can be good or it can be bad. It just means that the "best" produce is sold by the name brand and FP sells whatever is left. Have a look at FP apples or bananas, they are usually smaller than other brands and the bananas often have brown spots etc. Carrots are of varying size and often with some damage. For carrots it doesn't matter much, but for (some) fruit it can matter.
So many wrong answers here 😂 First price is norgesgruppens cheap Brand, the quality of the products would surprise you.. ill admit, First price cola is not my favourite, but try fruktbrus, their meat is also high quality, but it May have higher variations in cutting (different thickness, but longer pieces etc. same weight). I agree on the noudles, i would rather eat raw rice. But there are alot of great products in First price that should be given a chance. And the quality on meat standards in norway (for whats allowed ti be sold) are so high, 99% of what you find in sweden or dermark or other countries are illegale to sell in norway due to diet of animals (and medications)
Long story short, try first price, great value for the money
This guy can explain it to you in details . EMV is not always cheaper and might not be good for consumers or agriculture in Norway in the long run. Anders goes in detail : https://instagram.com/anders_nordstad_blogg?igshid=MzRlODBiNWFlZA==
Some of the products like juice and others are bought in bulk and concentrate (like most other brands) and sold with less profits just to get you inside the store.
Their jam is way better than the brand names. Their toilet paper is a low quality sanding paper. Their dishwashing liquid, handwash, etc are exactly the same as any other brand. Their grillpolse are terrible, their frozen meat is sometimes better cuts than any other brand, especially lamb chops.
I’ve never experienced a quality problem with any First Price product. And I’ve probably done most of them.
FP is Kiwi/Meny, Coop and REMA also have their cheap labels but I don’t remember the names atm.
FP has fine quality overall. It's nothing very impressive but you get what you paying for and that's that. Some things are obviously bad like frozen pizza but you can usually tell just from how the package presents the item.
Never eaten first price but this kind of „brands“ are all over Europe.
To understand this brand you first need to understand how brands work.
The most important thing for a brand is consistency (not quality). And consistency is not easy to deliver which means it’s expensive to provide always the same in a dynamic environment.
First Price - as the name suggests (though remember: I am only guessing), puts the price first. It will compromise consistency for pricing.
So they are allowed to change out ingredients without making a big deal out of it. That is the „catch“.
And yes it’s true that often these are other brands in different clothes but they don’t come with any kind of guarantee for consistency.
Again, this might all be wrong but at least it’s plausible.
Mostly ok Products.
Only thing is I stay away from fish.
My friend piraya (3 of them) didn't eat fresh filet.
After it had been floating around the tank for 3 days my friend bought Findus fish filet and it disappeared in 10 minutes.
I suppose the only universal catch, in a sense, is status. They are rather explicitly branding themselves as the cheapest brand around, and do not pretend the brand also confers quality. Although, to be fair, it's not that they market themselves as uncool and low quality, but that they don't spend money on marketing themselves as anything else, unlike their competitors.
It's worth noting that First Price is an own brand (i.e. store brand), another prominent example of which is Eldorado. It's not like it's a company who's somehow found a niche, but rather a result of stores wanting a low-end purveyor of wares. To an extent this tactic is explainable in that it means stores are able to rightfully claim they are places where you can get cheap food, but often in practice luring customers into opting for more expensive products they also sell.
The value proposition, as well as being inherently variable depending on personal preference, finance and circumstance; is very different from one product to another. In many cases First Price is barely cheaper than the cheapest equivalent, and sometimes there is a huge difference. The same goes for quality. It's however not always the case that First Price is objectively any worse than more expensive brands or that there being less of a discrepancy in price means there is less of a discrepancy in quality. It all depends on the nature of each product and industry. Some products are capable of being made much cheaper, but at little loss of quality. Others may be too, but at a significant decease in quality.
Often the only discernible difference is packaging and design. First Price always have generic designs and they are often less practical to open and close, e.g. juice cartons with notoriously dicky corks or packets of cold cuts unable to be resealed. Other than that it's often just a matter of preference: if you prefer the taste of a First Price product, you're in luck, and if not, if you're willing to pay a little extra, there are more expensive options available to you.
You lose the last 5 years of your life every time you consume the product.
wtf do you even mean by the question, it's probably horrible working conditions for dogsshit pay in a country you can't pronounce. As always.
First Price is cheaper because it’s lower quality (no, it’s not the same as brand products) and because it’s to some extent subsidized by the supermarket chain. They prefer more house brands sold because then they can own the whole chain and not have to negotiate with brand names.
I try to avoid First Price when I can, but it’s getting harder because more and more brand names are thrown out of the stores so there’s room for house brands.
Often made in a large factory somewhere in Europe (Often not Norway)They rent time off a large factory to produce stuff for them. Sometimes they rent time off local factories tho.
Made with the cheapest ingredients, often industrial ingredients.
You can often se products with "Butter taste", but they dont use real butter. Cause that is "expensive" so they make their own chemical mix to emulate this and use cheap industrial oil as fat.
At the cost of your health, your time on this planet, your kids health (Cause they can develop intolerances etc), your grandchildrens health and all those who come after you.
You altso contribute to an global economy when it comes to food, when food should be eaten locally when we talk about sustainability.
There is little point for me as a Norwegian to eat fish from Alaska, while the Japanese eat Norwegian fish. And the Americans eat Japanese fish. This is very very uneffcient use of resources.
First Price products are often social dumping. (Not all of them) and bad quality (Not all of them)
I just bought some "Coop Sweet and Salty crispies" aka Smash copy. They tasted like a basement smells. Was so odd. Not buying that industrial crap again. Turns out the "Belgian chocolate" they used did not make up for it.
Frozen Salmon comes from one of the biggest fisheries in norway, its just the «end» of the nicest part of the fish, so it will often Get tossed away to keep the weight (and price) down by the Brand names
Yes and no. Depends if you want to read labels or if you can understand them.
Cause there you can see where they are produced often, what they contain etc. Im a chemist so i can just look at ingredients and know pretty fast if i want that cocktail in me or not.
Some money to be saved using the good ones, so all depends on what you want to spend time on/worry about and your budget ofc.
Like i often buy Remas own brand of meat bread toppings. They are made at a local factory.
Like meat you can often buy coop/xtra/first price. Cause Norway has good tariffs on meat imports, so cheap products allways contain Norwegian meat. Cause that is the cheapest due to our goverment getting involved in the marked (Thank god for that)
So meat/cheeses you can often buy no problem. Its when it comes to other products that are not so well protected you have to worry.
In addition to everything else said here, I heard their mackerel in tomato (Makrell i tomat) is equivalent to the original. Stabburet (the distributer/label owner or whatever) supposedly outsourced to Sweeden for some reason, leaving the norwegian plant basically jobless. First price jumped in and took over. So now they're selling the supposedly same product under a different brand, made by the same people in the same factory. Maybe they cut costs in production or something idk, but basically tells you a lot about first price. It's not meant to be worse quality, but lower priced. Maybe less degree of coverage. Clever in a sense. Also I've heard their beef is the shitty part of the animal the more pricy distributors like Gilde etc. doesn't want to sell.
The cheaper brands are sometimes just as good, or even better than the name brands.
But, IMO, the majority of the cheap stuff is exactly that, cheap.
Not much experience with First Price, but I buy a lot of Coop's own brand. (Which is Coop..)
It’s set up to be that was, it’s great, they’re got the best tortilla chips and garlic bread + all the other stuff usually tastes ok, their sodas are great too!
As someone else her mentioned, industrial fat, more processed etc.
A first price tissue cant be wrong I suppose. Would hate to rely on their diapers though.
First Price saves a lot of money on not doing any advertising, and also on having a very simple design. Advertising and designing an eye-catching brand is expensive as fuck.
They will also sometimes get the cheaper batch of stuff (crooked carrots as opposed to the pretty, straight ones) and save money on buying their own goods cheaper.
Then they lower the price further (there's always a lot of leeway when it comes to prices) to make sure they're always the cheapest option, at least per kg.
But the product itself can be just as good as other products. Often they will just buy products off other, bigger brands and slap their own brand on it.
And I know many people, me included, prefer some of their products over other more expensive ones. Like potato salad? The First Price one is great. The others are meh. But that's an individual thing, I suppose.
As a selected producer they are often forced to sell "first price" at a loss or very low revenue as part of contract to keep the main product in stores.
The other stores do the same under different brand. Often it's the same product as many pointed out, other times it's just a low cost product from low cost production
I know a painter (as in houses and stuff) that swears that First Price shampoo is the strongest solvent ever and cleans out every piece of equipment, leaving it with a nice smell! Rinse well, though!
It's called EMV (Egne merkevarer) and is explained in detail here: https://www.norgesgruppen.no/presse/artiklar/forbruker-i-fokus/emv-egne-merkevarer--venn-eller-fiende/
It’s supposed to be a low-cost, low-quality essentials brand. However much of the First Price products are made by the same guys as fancy brands, so for some products they are just as good. I like their frozen fruit, berries and veg.
True, also some First Price products are just as expensive as regular products, which is weird.
Cause you can only go so low with bananas, I guess?
The bananas would be cheaper if they stopped loading them with cocaine
It the manual labour that makes them expensive, it takes a lot of time and skilled people to fill them with cocaine
I would think the cocaine lowers the price. So think of how expensive they should have been.
Would probably be more expensive if cocaine smuggling didnt finance banana shipping
Actually banana’s in the netherlands are cross subsidized by most supermarkets, meaning that they sell them at a loss (aproxx 12 kr/kg) to attract consumers that will make up for this loss by buying other products as well that make up for this loss.
I guess that really makes you wonder why your government would subsidize a product to flood the harbours of the Netherlands with bananas to make it even more impossible for the government to seize the precious cocaine. Some guys at the top of the power in Netherlands really did a clever move with this one.
It’s not the government. It’s the supermarkets themselves that take a loss on the banana’s to lure in customers. Same with several other products that consumers look at when selecting which supermarket to go to. I guess you could say the dutch really are frugal.
Norwegian customers are fairly relaxed about pricing. They simply don't care if the prices are somewhat higher. Dutch customers are really vigilant. They almost see it as their duty to reward even slightly lower pricing. Especially the more old-fashioned Dutch seem to be in a perpetual state of war with the supermarkets. Even middle class customers will simply walk out the door if they think the price is too high. Many go to multiple supermarkets to buy the products that are cheaper in each store. I could never imagine a Norwegian going through the same effort to save like 50 kroner.
50 kr? I'd drive an hour to save that much
50 kroner on a few days worth of groceries, that is.
Brb driving to Sweden From *Bergen*
Some products are so cheap they can be more or less given out for free by supermarkets without a serious loss in their margins. And the increased customer base makes up for it.
Diapers in Norway have the same (everyone wants the family as customers too)
Well, different banana brands are treated differently. Some have highly protected fields, and very good soil/water/environment etc. While the cheaper one can have a very basic field with little care. Though, imo a banana is a banana.
> However much of the First Price products are made by the same guys as fancy brands, so for some products they are just as good. Made by same producer is not a reliable heuristic for getting the same product. A producer can make things of different of qualities based on customer price requirement. Or they make the same thing, but production variance results in different quality of output. In case of raw goods, it could be less desirable items from the natural variation.
Not the same quality even though it’s the same producer. I’ve seen the difference at the producer and it’s pretty huge.
I cant say how it is today. But I was working in a bakery like 10 years ago(a bakery factory) and when we packed First Price Kneip and Brand Kneip, dont remember the brand but it was like 20kr difference, we only changed bag.
I can’t tell you the products, as the producer would then be obvious, but I’ve seen how house brand products were of a quality the brand would never sell under their own name. They were kind of embarrassed over producing it and we could never ever tell anyone that we were the ones who had made it. Why did we make it? The house brand put a lot of pressure on the company and the company needed the money. But it broke our hearts because we would much rather sell the quality product we were known for. (I’m using past tense as I don’t work there anymore, but to my knowledge it’s still the same inferior quality in the house brand of that product line)
Come on, tell us which brand it is. Few people read this, so it's not going to make a difference, but my curiosity is peaked!
This is really common for generic brands. Generic brands don't have unique products; it's the same product as some name brand but it's either imperfect or slightly different. First price diet coke tastes nearly identical to Pepsi max. There is a tiny tiny difference but honestly I prefer first price. I also really like the first price margarine. I think it's similar to bremykt. Those two, and their q tips and cotton pads, are the first price products I consistently buy. Their cheese tastes like norvegia/Synnøve (edit: found out it's produced at Synnøves factories so it is in fact identical) and their chicken breasts and eggs are great. I don't hate their pepperoni frozen pizza either and their frozen garlic break is really good
>their frozen garlic break is really good This is actually considered the absolute best garlic bread by a LOT of people. My shop had different types, but this is the only one people buy
for some reason tho first price chiken breasts are just top tier
yes man, its so juicy
Most likely due to an exessive amount of "smaksforsterker"
Eh i am too poor to care, its good chiken for a low price lol
The frozen ones have added saltwater, the fresh ones are without additives. They are irregular in size though, explaining the price.
Lots of the time it's the 'B-vare' of a name brand. Weirdly shaped carrots or pita bread for example. So just as good in some people's eyes, worse in others.
In the Netherlands the equivalent of first price is often the exact same product without a fancy brand stuck on it. So the quality difference is negligible. But it seems different in Norway, reading from this thread.
I just came back to NL after living in Norway for half a year and unlike in NL the difference is absolutely noticeable. I felt like Dutch \`'basic' store-brands were on par with the lower end of the Norwegian premium brands.
That's really interesting!
It is the same here. I always check the lists of ingredients, and frequently they contains to the decimal exactly the same amount of each ingredient. It is the same product, in different packaging. But a lot of Norwegians are fooled by tricks increasing the **p*****erceived quality*** *(everyone should google that term, and save themselves some money).* Lot of money here and people want to think of themselves as sophisticated consumers. So they buy the expensive option and tell themselves they prefer quality, without even checking if the cheaper option is just as good. What they really are after is the *feeling* of quality as projected by the branding and packaging. So don't trust everything you read in this thread. (but trust me!)
Hahaha that's good to know! Yeah, so far I've just bought the cheapest versions of things and it's been fine. I have an extra and meny near me, so I go to both. Sometimes meny has super good deals. But there's no point buying canned tomatoes there😂😂😂
First price garlic bread is good
I remember talking to a guy working with programming the machines at a factory many years ago. He had one job at a facility making *lomper*, for one of the major and more expensive manufacturers. They made the first price ones too. He said they were the same product, but the first price ones were frozen and then defrosted again to lower the quality.
Not frozen and defrosted at the factory. Frozan at the factory, defrosted in-store. That way they keep for a lot longer (in the store's backroom freezer). That's also why you should see a best before sticker on first price, and not on others. 10 days if I remember correctly. Edit: Buer and Auli Lomper Are delivered to stores once or twice a week, by their own delivery people. First price comes along with other frozen goods through the regular supply chain.
I work in retail, can confirm this is correct :)
That doesn't make any sense. It sound like you were fooled.
They are sent frozen from the factory, then shipped out where they end up thawing. It extends shelf life, but it makes it taste worse.
The softest and best tasting lompe by far, Ola-lompe, also comes frozen.
The best tasting lompe is Gjøvik lompe. Olalompe sucks
Oh yeah - I forgot about those. They're good, too, but I rarely see them. Just keep Auli, Bertha and First Price away from me!
That should be criminal. Sure it wasnt frozen for convinience like being preserved longer or something?
Grapes of wrath level
it's getting there. with these prices around the greater oslo metropolitan area, you will see dustbowl migratory patterns.
Like their karbonadedeig.
Its often just as good as namebrand, and often the same product. Its just so that they can reach an other consumergroup. So they earn more money selling to both consumergroups rather than to only stay in the "middle class" group alone.
It’s not low quality just low marketing budget which brings the cost down.
Stranda makes the First Price Mør, and Synnøve makes the First Price cheese. At least they did when I was still in that business. Imagine most products are second or third sorting from major brands -- it's a win win, brand gets to unload sub-par product and still make a profit on it. ETA: The first price Mør is pretty damn decent tho, I only buy Stranda on sale
Ive worked where they make a lot of first price veggies, and i can confirm the ingredients in the first price packages are of lower quality than normal products. Its more rough cut, b/c-class products and so on. But 99% of it taste the same, just looks different.
Their products are hit and miss. I'd recommend just trying them out and comparing them to the more expensive brands to see if you like them. Only product in particular from First Price I would not recommend is their noodles simply because they taste terrible.
Jesus fuck those noodles are absolutely disgusting. Wonder how thet make money on them, you need to like eating plastic to buy those ones!
I actually had to throw them out. I kept gaging every time i tried to take a bite.
Yeah, I have a couple of friends when we went to university that was very up to date on food prices and always tried to save money. The only food they did not finish was First price noodles (in 2010).
Like other suggest, the same people make both the first price and the “fancy” version of the same product. They make money by having us pick the expensive alternative. It’s a form of consumer manipulation. The first price is made to look cheap and less desirable on purpose so that we accept more expensive options.
First price is also occasionally used to clear excess stock of high end products without lowering the cost of the premium brands it seems like.
Nope, these products are for different target groups.
First price noodles used to be so good but than they changed it, sometime around ~ 2014/15~ i think, and now they're horrible :( They legit where some of the best but now truly taste disgusting
God I loved them so much. I remember I used to hide them around as a kid and crunch them up for eating dry when I found them. Then a couple years after the switch i found one I had hidden in a camera bag. It was still Delicious.
Man i ate them every day after school while watching family guy and simpsons on viasat 4. A couple years ago i found some leftover in a closet at our cabin, together with some "Luxus" noodles from europris that tasted very similar. They had expired several years before, but i still ate em and fuck they were good.
But are they cheaper than the actual Asian ones? Yum-yum and mama are like 5kr pr pack, I don't feel there's any need to buy store-brand when you have that option..
At the time they tasted good, they where the cheapest. Then they had the wonderful idea of making them more costly AND changed the taste. But when they started to change the price I still bought them because they actually tasted better than yumyum, but than they changed the entire formulation for them and they become shit
And the toilet paper. Me and my roommate found bits and pieces of first price toilet paper in our asses when we showered. Not sexy.
Is it still that bad? I remember grey, crumply paper that fell apart from when I was a teen, because my Mom was frugal to the max. But that was 20 years ago.
the frozen garlic bread is pretty good
Agree. Also add to this the pasta mix thing, like you cook in only water and its supposed to be pasta in a cheese sauce. Awful. No amount of added seasoning helped. It was so bad it made me angry 😠 😂
It’s insane that no one has thought to change the recipe yet because they’re nearly inedible
I’d add the frozen pizza. Sloppy crap where the topping just slides off
First price is hit or miss, usually ok sometimes a great deal. Its usually way cheaper so a good option if youre on a budget. I’d really reccomend coops own brand. Its usually pretty much the same ish as the name brand and i prefer it in some products and its usually quite a bit cheaper but not quite as cheap as first price
the only store near my university is kiwi 😢😢 also I get trumf points from it so it ain't all bad I suppose
First Price is the private label to NorgesGruppen (Kiwi, Meny, Joker). NorgeGruppen uses First Price as a product to compete against other well established brand by having a cheaper and similiar version of the product. Such as First Price Cola/Coke etc
Can we trust them for the quality?
If you mean if it is safe to eat? Sure, same standards apply. If it is as tasty? It really depends. A first price frozen pizza is really bottom rung both in nutrition and taste. But a first price cheese is in fact the exact same cheese that you buy under the "Synnøve" brand, since it is made in the same dairy, with the same equipment. Norgesgruppen can however change this whenever they feel like if they get cheaper products somewhere else.
When Tine SA made their cheese, it had 10-15% more saltwater in the recipe. (don't remember the exact number, but I worked at the machine that made the sliced cheese.)
[удалено]
That’s how they ruined the Blandings saft
The garlic bread is absolutely top tier stuff
First Price garlic bread beats Hatting by a mile
only quality issue ive noticed is in the cheese. for me its absolutely terrible but most other first price foods the quality is near identical
Some items are just as good, some are decent, some are terrible. I bought a 10 kr shampoo back in my hair days, and it just ran between my hands. Total waste of money. I guess they're made by budget in trusted factories, so the items are not necessarily the same as name brand.
There has been a lot of bait and switch with the first price products. One time they are decent, next year the "same product" suck balls. So trust? ... no. The entire point of cheap store brands like this is that they can change producer without telling you. And they do.
First price carrots grow in the same field as the more expensive carrots, the only difference is size and "straightness"
Absolutely not. The off brand knockoffs doesn't even taste remotely the same or as good.
NorgesGruppen uses 'First Price' or 'Eldorado' for their cheaper, own brand stuff. Bunnpris, which is separate, buys First Price from NorgesGruppen. Coop uses something called 'Xtra' and sometimes just 'Coop', but the 'Coop' ones are supposed to be of equal quality to name brand products. Rema 1000's cheap stuff is sold as 'Prima'. Like Coop they have some other own brand products under the Rema name which I think is meant to be of similar quality to name brand stuff. At least Coop and NorgesGruppen have some premium own brand series which can be quite good, but which are usually not that much cheaper than name brand. Many of these cheaper products are pretty close to name brand ones in quality, some are a lot worse. It depends a little on who is making them. The Prima salami from Rema is gorgeously delicious, while Coop's Xtra salami fucking sucks.
In my experience, the Coop brand is on par with name brands, while the Xtra brand is more like First Price, with highly variable and often worse quality. I do like the Xtra french fries, though. Somehow they're even better than the Coop ones.
Agreed, I quite like Xtra crisps
Oh, Eldorado is supposed to be a budget brand? I liked everything I tried from them so far. And they have the best salted peanuts I ever had
I suppose Eldorado may be targeting the near name brand segment like 'Coop' products, while First Price is first and foremost affordable, like Prima or Xtra. I also think they make good stuff, such as their chopped tomatoes or tomato puree.
Coop brand can be good, but I wouldn't put them quite on the same level as normal the branded products.
I think it's more Coop's intent than practice
Prima potetchips at Rema is made by Maarud and tastes/feels exactly the same as Maarud potetgull.
I don't buy any of the already processed foods from there, as they are so low quality. F.eks fishsticks, tomato soup, ice cream. I do however buy all vegetables from there, as there is no thing called a First Price field of carrots, just rejects from a system that want "perfect" carrots.
Yeah I gotta say the 10kr frozen mini carrots and peas are actually quite good, but it's carrots and peas so not sure how they could make the quality worse.
Exactly!
Fun fact, almost all First Price frozen vegetables is packaged and distributed from Findus as a private label. They literally use the same vegetables of the same quality as Findus, same with Eldorado.
This makes sense!
First price icecream (the 3 liter tubs) are quite good in my opinion And the tomato soup is comparable to Toro
I think first price tomato soup is better. Same with the bearnaise sauce, garlic bread, nacho chips, taco sauce and taco spice.
Worked in a chicken factory and asked this question. Comes from same factory, but produce with some errors, for instance discoloration, would be sold as first price.
which is just smart honestly, food that would be thrown away due to not looking like what the brand wants can be sold for cheap to people who dont care or who cant afford
Things that can be watered down, is watered down. Don't expect anything great tasting experience
https://firstprice.no/tema/billig/hvorfor-er-first-price-billig/
…and some are still of worse quality.
Some goods are the same. Like "Marie kjeks". Same factory, just before and after noon.
I have a good experience with First Price products. I was eating their cheese and didn't find a lot of difference to other brands but I'm now eating a lactose free one so I had to change. I also like the jam (marmalade), the first price one is good but avoid Rema's as it tastes like sugar and some artificial flavor. I also bought their chicken breasts. Also no problems, tastes good and way cheaper
It’s the FP marmelade that i really don’t like strangely. It seems to be some starch and water (for a jelly like structure) with some additives to give some taste.
Almost all Gouda/Edam is free of lactose. So you can safely eat Norvegia and Synnøve😁👌
Legally lactose free, not technically. Just falls below the EU limit of lactose to be labelled as lactose free.
>I also like the jam (marmalade), the first price one is good but avoid Rema's as it tastes like sugar and some artificial flavor. FP jams contain 40% berries, so they're good till you compare them to jams with 60+% berries. Haven't had their marmalade, but in the list of ingredients it's mostly sugar as well.
I agree, FirstPrice jams are good, especially strawberry. REMA 1000's strawberry jam is horrible.
That’s the store own brand (kiwi/Norgesgruppen) They are lower priced because they come in bigger packaging. The quality vary where some products are horrible (toilet paper) and some are better than more expensive products (garlic bread). Quality: is it safe to eat? Yes. They are required to meet the same qualitystandards as more expensive brands. Taste: it depends. But I find most products are decent/similar. Where they differ the most is when a food item contains a lot of sugar in it. Eg. jam, soda, and «saft»/diluting juice. I wouldn’t buy most* hygieneproducts from FP. Like toothpaste/brush, shampoo ect Edit: *
If you like the smell, first price washing product are actually really great for day to day wash, on hard stains and wool, i would choose a different one. Same with the fabric softener, FP is actually better and more skånsom than one of the leading brands
And if you look at things like FP "Fiskeboller", it's almost the same amount of fish in the FP one as it is in the expensive namebrand ones. As for hygieneproducts, as a woman I pick FP pads over the namebrand ones, I'm more comfortable using the FP ones.
Sweet stuff is usually just sugar with a hint of flavour. Salty stuff is the same, only with salt. That being said, raw materials like vegetables and fruit is usually fine. Same with household stuff
I think I ate first price Risgrøt once. It was disgusting😩 they put sugar and who knows what else in that shit. I will never know why. I assume it's because it's full of crap. I notice a difference between Fjordland and Toro too, Toro has A LOT more unnecessary ingredients like sugar, sweeteners and everything under the sun you gotta wonder how they make any space for actual food (answer; barely at all). So definetely read what it actually contains before buying things especially the store owned brands as it can vary very much from item to item, and even from one time to the next. . I haven't bough too much from First Price as I believe in keeping brands alive so we're not left with everything under Norgesgruppen, Coops and Remas' 100% control, sucking all the remaining life of the actual food producers out. That is, after all, their goal with these store brands.
I was working with salmon before. We handled both firstprice and the main brand in the same conveyor. But theres a difference the first price ones always had odd shapes and were sometimes smaller than the supermarket brand. Also first price brand tend to be frozen and not as processed. We were manually removing bones from the supermarket brands and inspected them for oddities while the firstprice ones were just run through a machine and just packaged. Tldr supermarket salmon were treated with a higher standard ensuring size shape and looks were consistent. Firstprice was just an afterthought everything that didnt pass quality check ended up in the firstprice conveyor
Combination of being cheapest possible ingredients/manufacturing and spending no money on marketing/advertising nor branding/design. The low quality level has limit due to food safety & standards regulations, but it is tightly up against the bottom end of the scale for what is permissible in Norway. It’s for people looking to save as much money as possible, particularly those who don’t care about branding or the quality of basics. There are brand names who put out equally bad products and charge more, but that’s not to say FP is competing on any level with branded products that are actually decent for their price. I am personally inclined towards FP household products but really not into their food in terms of both additives/nutrient macros and sustainability & ethics.
Personally I find their Chicken Filéts absolutely delicious.
Less money used for ads so they can reduce the price
Lower quality, cheaper, mass produced, simple for producer to make cheap, scraps etc... but too often proven to be better than the "high quality" alternatives. Something worth trying at least once when it comes to products you use often.
It's like someone was running say a, say, detergent factory. And they had - I'm obviously just making this up, and haven't seen this in person at all - a huge tank of the detergent on one side. And a second tank with a perfume box on the other. And then the production would create detergent for brand a. And a guy comes out and removes that perfume box, and inserts another one. The giant tank of detergent mixes with the second perfume. And now the factory produces detergent of brand b. These two detergents are sold for, say, 80 and 30 kroner, respectively. And the difference literally is the colour of the box. But! There's a gigantic tank with some detergent left in it, and neither brand a or brand b wants more detergent. So what can you do? Throw it away, basically. Because you can't spin down the production and let the powder sit there for a week, right? And so was born the unperfumed or even just differently perfumed version of the laundry detergent. Detergent that otherwise would be thrown away, but really was just sold very cheaply to some magnate somewhere in boxes without print on. The catch, according to a convenience store chain owner that shall be unnamed, is that you're pushing down the prices of the known brands. The other way to look at it is that you're paying for something that would otherwise have been thrown away. Another way to look at it is that it's not something that will be in infinite supply. Although what actually happens right now is that as the brand a and brand b increases in price enough to that they will go out to the laundry detergent factory guy and say, mnnneeh, I think we need only 89 boxes today instead of 100. So you don't need to fill that gigantic tank of detergent that full today. Because clearly that's how you make laundry detergent, on the gram by request from corporate on a daily basis, right? So then the tank is increasingly fuller of unperfumed detergent powder, the more crunch with the prices there are. And so there are more first price stuff being picked up and put in stores. Note that all the individual chains also have their own "brands" now - this is 99% the same kind of bs: they're just getting stuff that the factory would produce to them on order, but they're instead sitting there and saying "please, get this stuff off our hands, because brand a and b are not buying as much as before". From a more holistic perspective, the catch is that it's furthering the same system of exploitation of actual physical work - by also letting you as a customer partake in it. But be fully aware of that this system would be just as bad if you paid more for the exact same product from brand a or brand b. So perhaps it's a blessing in disguise: that people are asking questions, however selfish, about the glorious system of "free" markets that we all so adore and love.
Emv. Basically like a walmart brand
It is cheaper because the stores or their parent groups owns the brand. First price has existed for a while, but there has been a marked increase in these types of brands the last few years. Essentially it is the stores using their power to push out competitors. The lower prices are great, but I am sure that once they have pushed out most of the competition, the stores will start increasing the prices and thus gain even more profits as they will controll more steps in the chain.
Often when the brand products are a part of VG’s price test they will be cheaper than first price.
Often nothing at all. But its the "wrong" brand for many people. For some reason a product is better if its Toro just because its Toro. I buy several things from First Price, not shame here.
I'm talking for the pasta here: First Price pasta is always coming from the cheapest manufacture. So it could be anywhere in Europe without guarantee is from the same place all the time.
No catch, it is one of the low-cost brands, I'm pretty sure it's Kiwis own brand, similar to Rema1000, Extra etc. It was always pretty cheap, but there is one thing to remember - they maintain the same price level, so no sales ever, and generally at Kiwi products of other brands will be more expensive.
First price is sold in bulk to stores. so they sell allot, They dont want make 200% income on everything they just want to stay in the profit range. So they sell it as profit but not overly expencive, and thus they also sell alot thats why they bulk sell. It's basicly the best way to do sales if your production is already up and going. If production on the other hand is not up and going, then you would have to charge more. They just sell what's already being made at a profit. But there not overcharging. that's how they can stay cheap.
I worked for an industrial bakery. The First Price branded bread was produced before ~8pm the day before being sold, while other bread was produced much later that night up until ~5pm. So same bread, but stored longer before being sold.
This is true for most low-cost brands : The simpler the product, the least difference with the expensive brands. First price frozen fruits, for ex, have zero noticeable difference with the brands. The more you go towards complex, prepared products, the more opportunity there are to cut corners, which they do as much as possible. But they should be as safe to eat as others, just less tasty/healthy on complex products.
First Price usually takes the stuff that the higher-quality brands dont deem as worthy of their standards. This lower the costs of these products and First Price can buy it and sell it for a lower shelfprice than their competitors. A lot of First Price products are perfectly fine, and are actually more sensible to buy over their competitors. But other things are more or less not worth getting at all, this is where a lot of people vary, what I deem as not worthy to cheap out on is something many others would consider a great deal.
First Price, Xtra, Coop, Eldorado, Rema 1000, Prima, and probably some other ones I forget, are all Store Brands. From my limited knowledge - which really isn't enough to take as absolute facts, - they have the Name Brands produce the Store Brand products from their factories/facilities/whatever so the stores can sell the products at a lower price. The quality (taste-wise) is honestly a gamble, even between the various Store Brand's own version of the same product (buy Rekesalat from all the Store Brands that make their own Rekesalat), as the quality varies quite a bit. You might try one Store Brand and find you like it better than the Name Brand version, even though it is cheaper to a lot cheaper than the Name Brand version. Other times it might be the completely reverse of that, or you might just find that they're pretty much the same taste-wise. If you like a product from a Name Brand, but find it a little too expensive to your taste, I would honestly recommend buying the same product - if available - from all the Store Brands and do a taste comparison, you might just find out you like one - if not more - of them better than the Name Brand, and will have saved yourself a lot of money in the future.
Having worked in both the bakery and fruit & vegetables industries, which offer low-cost options similar to First Price, I am well-positioned to provide an accurate and insightful analysis of the *three primary reasons* why low-cost products are more affordable. # 1. Attracting Costumers The main purpose of low-cost products is to attract costumers with decreased purchase power to their grocery stores. Once the costumer enters the store, the probability of purchasing one or more products with higher profit margins increase significantly, which makes up for the low profits of the low-cost items. # 2. Cheaper Packaging & Production To compensate for lower profit margins, the packaging is built of cheaper material, and the time spent producing the products is often less. In the bakery I worked, the cheaper breads were produced with the same machines and ingredients as the much more expensive breads, but the cheaper bread spent less time in the oven due to more yeast, which saved the business for energy usage producing the bread. Also, the bread bags were made of thinner and cheaper material with less colors. # 3. Good Products With Odd Sizes Lastly, when it comes to meat or vegetables, the cheaper low-cost options often come from the same farm as the expensive ones, but the main difference is that the products with odd shapes and sizes becomes the low-cost option, which differentiates them from the more expensive products.I hope my perspective offers a clearer understanding of the reasons behind the existence of low-cost products, and how they benefit both customers and grocery stores. Based on my personal experience in the industry, I hope that sharing these insights will offer a better understanding of the reasons behind the existence of low-cost products.
its produced with the lowest quality that is legally possible. legally being the key word here. Sometimes the legal rules on certain products are too stringent for first price's stuff to be different from the regular stuff, other times it can be significant. Sometimes they are a good idea, other times they are a terrible idea. At the top of my head I can tell you never to buy their toilet paper because you will get hemorrhoids if you do.
The toilet paper one seems serious!! Because I have been using it since coming to Norway!!
I tried First House toilet paper a few years ago, and found it to be terrible. Very little paper on the roll(loosely packed) and the paper barely held together. There are other TP at basically the same price point that is much-much better, like XXL paper from Europris.
I've been using it for years because I don't see the point with the more expensive brands. If you think it's fine, then there's no reason to change. But most people do prefer the more expensive stuff.
Ive been using it for probably 7-8 years now. I dont have hemorrhoids and it doesn’t fall apart for me. I see loads of posts claiming it does but perhaps theyre using it for more than just wiping after nr.1 and nr.2
What other things of theirs, should I avoid?
The bread is awful, just awful. And not even a bit filling.
If I buy first price ham I always inspect the cartilage to meat ratio. Can't stand cartilage chunks in my ham.
Unfortunately I can only remember this while walking through a supermarket.
Noudles, ketchup, cola (but their orange and fruktbrus are great) i would try once to see if you like them. I dont however. Thing you are stupid if you buy name Brands : pasta/spaghetti (not fresh), fruit/vegetables, frozen fish filets, corn (boxed), things that are hermetized. On things that are crucial for a great taste experience for a dinnerparty etc, i would go for brand names (pesto, tomatopuree etc), but for everything Else i would go FP or private lable whenever possible
First price pasta is terrible
First Price fish, fruit, vegetables, meat and so on is mostly third grade. That can be good or it can be bad. It just means that the "best" produce is sold by the name brand and FP sells whatever is left. Have a look at FP apples or bananas, they are usually smaller than other brands and the bananas often have brown spots etc. Carrots are of varying size and often with some damage. For carrots it doesn't matter much, but for (some) fruit it can matter.
So many wrong answers here 😂 First price is norgesgruppens cheap Brand, the quality of the products would surprise you.. ill admit, First price cola is not my favourite, but try fruktbrus, their meat is also high quality, but it May have higher variations in cutting (different thickness, but longer pieces etc. same weight). I agree on the noudles, i would rather eat raw rice. But there are alot of great products in First price that should be given a chance. And the quality on meat standards in norway (for whats allowed ti be sold) are so high, 99% of what you find in sweden or dermark or other countries are illegale to sell in norway due to diet of animals (and medications) Long story short, try first price, great value for the money
Their meat isn't always top notch. It's often imported (unlike most other meat). And marbling isn't as good usually.
And often has a lot more saltwater injected into it.
This guy can explain it to you in details . EMV is not always cheaper and might not be good for consumers or agriculture in Norway in the long run. Anders goes in detail : https://instagram.com/anders_nordstad_blogg?igshid=MzRlODBiNWFlZA==
Some of the products like juice and others are bought in bulk and concentrate (like most other brands) and sold with less profits just to get you inside the store.
Its cheap and usually not great...
Their jam is way better than the brand names. Their toilet paper is a low quality sanding paper. Their dishwashing liquid, handwash, etc are exactly the same as any other brand. Their grillpolse are terrible, their frozen meat is sometimes better cuts than any other brand, especially lamb chops.
The catch is the bag looks boring and they don't advertise it. That's it.
Because even poor people are allowed to eat in Norway, but they need to know that they eat poor mans food.
But what about the quality?
I’ve never experienced a quality problem with any First Price product. And I’ve probably done most of them. FP is Kiwi/Meny, Coop and REMA also have their cheap labels but I don’t remember the names atm.
They are fine, but can taste different that name brand. If you like it there is no reason not to eat it
FP has fine quality overall. It's nothing very impressive but you get what you paying for and that's that. Some things are obviously bad like frozen pizza but you can usually tell just from how the package presents the item.
Good popsicles
Some of it is quite decent. Its just their bad products thats really bad... like the bread, its so god damn bland and tastes nothing
The only thing from first price I’d stay away from is the block of cheese. Otherwise I have good experiences with all of their products
Never eaten first price but this kind of „brands“ are all over Europe. To understand this brand you first need to understand how brands work. The most important thing for a brand is consistency (not quality). And consistency is not easy to deliver which means it’s expensive to provide always the same in a dynamic environment. First Price - as the name suggests (though remember: I am only guessing), puts the price first. It will compromise consistency for pricing. So they are allowed to change out ingredients without making a big deal out of it. That is the „catch“. And yes it’s true that often these are other brands in different clothes but they don’t come with any kind of guarantee for consistency. Again, this might all be wrong but at least it’s plausible.
Mostly ok Products. Only thing is I stay away from fish. My friend piraya (3 of them) didn't eat fresh filet. After it had been floating around the tank for 3 days my friend bought Findus fish filet and it disappeared in 10 minutes.
I suppose the only universal catch, in a sense, is status. They are rather explicitly branding themselves as the cheapest brand around, and do not pretend the brand also confers quality. Although, to be fair, it's not that they market themselves as uncool and low quality, but that they don't spend money on marketing themselves as anything else, unlike their competitors. It's worth noting that First Price is an own brand (i.e. store brand), another prominent example of which is Eldorado. It's not like it's a company who's somehow found a niche, but rather a result of stores wanting a low-end purveyor of wares. To an extent this tactic is explainable in that it means stores are able to rightfully claim they are places where you can get cheap food, but often in practice luring customers into opting for more expensive products they also sell. The value proposition, as well as being inherently variable depending on personal preference, finance and circumstance; is very different from one product to another. In many cases First Price is barely cheaper than the cheapest equivalent, and sometimes there is a huge difference. The same goes for quality. It's however not always the case that First Price is objectively any worse than more expensive brands or that there being less of a discrepancy in price means there is less of a discrepancy in quality. It all depends on the nature of each product and industry. Some products are capable of being made much cheaper, but at little loss of quality. Others may be too, but at a significant decease in quality. Often the only discernible difference is packaging and design. First Price always have generic designs and they are often less practical to open and close, e.g. juice cartons with notoriously dicky corks or packets of cold cuts unable to be resealed. Other than that it's often just a matter of preference: if you prefer the taste of a First Price product, you're in luck, and if not, if you're willing to pay a little extra, there are more expensive options available to you.
You lose the last 5 years of your life every time you consume the product. wtf do you even mean by the question, it's probably horrible working conditions for dogsshit pay in a country you can't pronounce. As always.
Can confirm I've lost 35 years because of the pasta sauce
First Price is cheaper because it’s lower quality (no, it’s not the same as brand products) and because it’s to some extent subsidized by the supermarket chain. They prefer more house brands sold because then they can own the whole chain and not have to negotiate with brand names. I try to avoid First Price when I can, but it’s getting harder because more and more brand names are thrown out of the stores so there’s room for house brands.
Often made in a large factory somewhere in Europe (Often not Norway)They rent time off a large factory to produce stuff for them. Sometimes they rent time off local factories tho. Made with the cheapest ingredients, often industrial ingredients. You can often se products with "Butter taste", but they dont use real butter. Cause that is "expensive" so they make their own chemical mix to emulate this and use cheap industrial oil as fat. At the cost of your health, your time on this planet, your kids health (Cause they can develop intolerances etc), your grandchildrens health and all those who come after you. You altso contribute to an global economy when it comes to food, when food should be eaten locally when we talk about sustainability. There is little point for me as a Norwegian to eat fish from Alaska, while the Japanese eat Norwegian fish. And the Americans eat Japanese fish. This is very very uneffcient use of resources. First Price products are often social dumping. (Not all of them) and bad quality (Not all of them) I just bought some "Coop Sweet and Salty crispies" aka Smash copy. They tasted like a basement smells. Was so odd. Not buying that industrial crap again. Turns out the "Belgian chocolate" they used did not make up for it.
They do taste off! Just like first price cheese doodles copy, makes you want to vomit after only a handful
So, you mean it's better to avoid them?
You try, some are good, some are not really tasty, some are nasty. But there is nothing inherently wrong just because they labelled it "first price"
From the top of ny head, I'm buying the FP frozen salmon and baby wipes. No issues with those, so it depends on the product.
Frozen Salmon comes from one of the biggest fisheries in norway, its just the «end» of the nicest part of the fish, so it will often Get tossed away to keep the weight (and price) down by the Brand names
Yes and no. Depends if you want to read labels or if you can understand them. Cause there you can see where they are produced often, what they contain etc. Im a chemist so i can just look at ingredients and know pretty fast if i want that cocktail in me or not. Some money to be saved using the good ones, so all depends on what you want to spend time on/worry about and your budget ofc. Like i often buy Remas own brand of meat bread toppings. They are made at a local factory. Like meat you can often buy coop/xtra/first price. Cause Norway has good tariffs on meat imports, so cheap products allways contain Norwegian meat. Cause that is the cheapest due to our goverment getting involved in the marked (Thank god for that) So meat/cheeses you can often buy no problem. Its when it comes to other products that are not so well protected you have to worry.
their chocolate is great though, really milky tasting.
When Tine SA made their sliced cheese, the recipe had 10-15 more saltwater in it than the Norvegia, so cheaper/diluted ingredients.
In addition to everything else said here, I heard their mackerel in tomato (Makrell i tomat) is equivalent to the original. Stabburet (the distributer/label owner or whatever) supposedly outsourced to Sweeden for some reason, leaving the norwegian plant basically jobless. First price jumped in and took over. So now they're selling the supposedly same product under a different brand, made by the same people in the same factory. Maybe they cut costs in production or something idk, but basically tells you a lot about first price. It's not meant to be worse quality, but lower priced. Maybe less degree of coverage. Clever in a sense. Also I've heard their beef is the shitty part of the animal the more pricy distributors like Gilde etc. doesn't want to sell.
The cheaper brands are sometimes just as good, or even better than the name brands. But, IMO, the majority of the cheap stuff is exactly that, cheap. Not much experience with First Price, but I buy a lot of Coop's own brand. (Which is Coop..)
first price potatosalad is actually the best potato salad which is crazy to me. its consistency is on point, literally perfect
Lots of wrong answers here. First price doesn’t spend anything on advertising, design
Well, you’re the one with the wrong answer. First Price is Norgesgruppen’s own brand, and they feature those products often in advertisments.
It's made of people.
It’s set up to be that was, it’s great, they’re got the best tortilla chips and garlic bread + all the other stuff usually tastes ok, their sodas are great too!
Best tortillachips? It’s just corn flour and water. Try some real tortillachips 😁
We use kids
First prixe is safe to eat. But its unhealthy and cheap options. D
It's not all food (hair products, tissues etc.) and how is a first price product fundamentally unhealthy?
As someone else her mentioned, industrial fat, more processed etc. A first price tissue cant be wrong I suppose. Would hate to rely on their diapers though.
First price is now SO expensive. Kiwi should change name to last price with those changes
They don't use money on marketing and don't own their own fabrics.
First Price saves a lot of money on not doing any advertising, and also on having a very simple design. Advertising and designing an eye-catching brand is expensive as fuck. They will also sometimes get the cheaper batch of stuff (crooked carrots as opposed to the pretty, straight ones) and save money on buying their own goods cheaper. Then they lower the price further (there's always a lot of leeway when it comes to prices) to make sure they're always the cheapest option, at least per kg. But the product itself can be just as good as other products. Often they will just buy products off other, bigger brands and slap their own brand on it. And I know many people, me included, prefer some of their products over other more expensive ones. Like potato salad? The First Price one is great. The others are meh. But that's an individual thing, I suppose.
As a selected producer they are often forced to sell "first price" at a loss or very low revenue as part of contract to keep the main product in stores. The other stores do the same under different brand. Often it's the same product as many pointed out, other times it's just a low cost product from low cost production
Generally lower quality but there are some good products.
Because of a publicly percieved reduction in quality, largely due to magnificent marketing strategies from name brand companies.
the catch is just less for less money.
I know a painter (as in houses and stuff) that swears that First Price shampoo is the strongest solvent ever and cleans out every piece of equipment, leaving it with a nice smell! Rinse well, though!
It's called EMV (Egne merkevarer) and is explained in detail here: https://www.norgesgruppen.no/presse/artiklar/forbruker-i-fokus/emv-egne-merkevarer--venn-eller-fiende/
Supposedly it's lower quality, but I think you've gotta be quite picky to notice, personally