I. The Store Brands Marketplace 2025: The Big Picture

The PLMA’s Store Brands Marketplace Conference, which took place November 16–18 in Chicago, is the most important yearly gathering for the supermarket and retail brands you find in your grocery aisle. This event is a recognized industry leader where nearly 1,900 companies showcase thousands of new food, household, and beauty products, making it the ultimate hub for product ideas and strategies.

The excitement building up for 2025 confirms one major truth: store brands are not a temporary fix for high prices; they are now the main way retailers make money and stand out.

The New Store Brand Economy: Facts You Need to Know

The numbers prove that store brands are consistently beating the big national companies. Over the first part of 2025, store brand sales grew by 3.7%, while national brands only grew by 1.1%. Even more important, people are actually buying more store brand items—unit sales are up—while national brand unit sales are shrinking. This shows that customers are truly switching their loyalty because they trust the quality and see better value.

This strong performance means total store brand revenue across the U.S. is expected to reach a record $280 billion. Today’s market rewards two things: super high-quality, specialty store products, and those that offer excellent value. The PLMA conference itself reflects this growth.

II. Keynote Deep Dive: Running a Smart, Tight Ship (The Lidl Playbook)

Joel Rampoldt, CEO of Lidl US, laid out a clear, disciplined strategy for success. He showed that having low prices isn't just about cutting corners; it's about running the business in a super-smart, strict way.

Store Brands Are the Core Business

For companies like Lidl, store brands are everything—the foundation of their entire business. They believe it’s the only way to deliver on their promise of offering the best price and the best quality every time. This strategy relies on having about 80% of products as store brands.

Lidl focuses on curated excellence, meaning they keep a tight, highly managed selection of about 3,300 core items. If they bring in something new, something old usually has to go out. They aim to build real brands (like their global DIY brand, Parkside, or their personal care brand, Cien), not just generic knock-offs.

A crucial part of their strategy is using fresh food as a quality signal. The first things customers see are fresh fruits, vegetables, flowers, and the bakery. The high quality and freshness of these perishable items send an instant message: if the quality is high here, you can trust everything else in the store.

Saving Money by Spending Money

Lidl keeps prices low by making smart investments that cut down on daily running costs.

• Electronic Shelf Labels (ESL): This technology replaces paper price tags with digital ones. It eliminates the wasted time and "thankless" job of constantly printing and updating paper tags, allowing minimal staff to focus on important tasks.

• Shelf Ready Packaging (SRP): This is essential to their model. It’s packaging that allows store staff to quickly put a full box or flat of items straight onto the shelf. This makes restocking fast and simple. When the packaging looks good and is clearly branded, it also becomes a subtle "selling point" for the customer.

Lidl’s growth is focused on regional density. Instead of opening one store randomly across the country, they open many stores in a small area, like Atlanta or the New York City region. This strategy makes their distribution centers and supply lines work much more efficiently.

Finally, Lidl wants long-term partnerships with suppliers. They look for companies willing to work with them to find joint ways to save time and cost across the whole supply chain. They also offer a huge opportunity: working with Lidl US is an "entree into a massive company," providing a direct link for suppliers to grow into Lidl’s European operations, which are vast.

III. Keynote Deep Dive: Understanding the Shopper's Mind (The Thurman Model)

Hunter Thurman, Founder of Alpha-Diver, emphasized that store brand success requires getting inside the consumer’s head. He pointed out that about 80% of why people buy things is emotional and subconscious, not just rational price comparisons.

The old idea that shoppers simply "trade down" for the cheapest option is wrong. In fact, aggressive visual promotions using bright red and yellow to "shout value" can actually backfire. The brain’s "cave logic" sometimes sees these aggressive colors as danger, creating cognitive friction and weakening trust. If everything is shouting about the price, nothing is whispering about trust.

Three Ways Shoppers See Brands

Modern shoppers see three types of brands:

1. Value Brands: The traditional, price-focused ones.

2. Own Brands: Innovative, high-quality brands unique to a retailer (like Kroger's Simple Truth).

3. National Brands: The familiar, traditional names.

Shoppers often buy Own Brands purely because they like the product, not realizing it belongs to the retailer. This confirms that the quality gap between the best store brands and national brands has essentially disappeared.

The Three Shopper Mindsets

Thurman’s model identifies three distinct shopper mentalities that dictate how they shop for store brands:

IV. The Strategic Imperatives for 2025: Trends and Technology

Store brand success in 2025 relies on combining Lidl's operational discipline with Thurman's psychological understanding, all supported by new consumer trends and technology.

Premium, Non-Food, and Green Choices

The idea of "value" has grown. It's not just about being cheap; it includes quality, convenience, and wellness. Store brands are now moving into the premium space, offering better quality combined with excellent prices. This expansion is moving beyond food into non-food categories like private label beauty, wellness, and general merchandise like DIY tools, where store brands now hold a large share of the market.

The Sourcing Mandate: Clean and Clear

Today’s shopper is asking tough questions about where their food and products come from. They are demanding what the industry calls the "clean label": products with ingredients that are recognizable, minimal, and naturally sourced.

This focus on ethical and high-quality ingredient standards is becoming essential for retailers, not just a nice bonus. Winning brands must now prioritize sustainable sourcing, meaning they actively evaluate the social and environmental impact of every purchase they make and every partner they work with. This pushes private brands to move beyond simple cost savings and ensure that their ingredients are unique and high-quality, standing up to scrutiny from farm to shelf.

Sustainability is also a major focus. Products that make environmental claims are experiencing much faster growth, especially within the private label sector. This strong growth helps build trust by proving that the store is committed to ethical, quality products.

The AI-First Store Brand

Artificial Intelligence (AI), especially the kind that generates content (GenAI), is no longer just hype. It is now essential for running the private label business.

• Faster Product Creation: AI helps speed up the entire product development process, reducing the time it takes to get new items to the shelf.

• Custom Local Assortments: AI solves a major headache for retailers: how to offer a simple, curated selection (Lidl’s 3,300 items) while still offering the unique, local products that the Explorer shopper wants. Assortment optimization tools use AI to create custom, local store selections quickly, all while keeping inventory simple and costs low.

• Better Partnerships: AI also gives retailers and suppliers a shared, clear view of product performance, leading to faster decisions and better, more efficient collaboration across the supply chain.

V. Conclusion: Positioning for the Next Generation of Private Brand Leadership

The path to private brand leadership in 2025 requires merging smart business operations with a deep understanding of human psychology.

The Lidl Playbook is the core operational rule: keep costs low and quality high through ruthless efficiency. This means using smart investments like ESL and demanding highly functional packaging like SRP.

The Thurman Model reminds us that strategy must focus on emotional drivers, not just price. Winning means using psychological triggers to serve the Simplifier (with efficiency), the Explorer (with novelty and discovery), and the Harmonizer (with trust and strong guarantees).

All of this must be made possible by AI-First capabilities, which provide the necessary speed and agility to manage customized local offerings without creating chaos. 

The future of the private brand depends on a non-negotiable commitment to high-quality, clean, and ethically sourced ingredients. Retailers and suppliers must adopt a “quality-first” sourcing mindset—where transparency and verifiable sustainability are the ultimate trust-builders—to win over the skeptical Harmonizer and the health-focused Explorer. The most successful store brands in 2025 will be those that achieve maximum efficiency, enabled by AI-First capabilities, while consistently delivering experiences that are viewed as high-quality, trustworthy, and of unmatched value.