My guess is that the brand names got stuck from their own popularity. People knew what they tasted like and might have reacted badly if they tried to tweak the recipe, whereas the budget brands were easier to either change or even discontinue and replace with slightly different branding. People were buying them for the price, not the recipe.
And then, after enough experimentation, they were able to figure out something that matched or surpassed the brand names.
In Canada, there’s the PC brand that I always considered a budget brand. Until I worked at an ice cream factory that had their own premium brand but also made some PC flavours. The PC ones looked better than the factory brand ones. The factory did things the old way (where ice cream flavours were still more about the ice cream than extras added) while PC focused more on the extras like cookie dough or chocolate caramel cups. I can only speak for myself, but I’m more into the extras than the ice cream itself, so it felt like PC was more in tune with what I wanted than the premium brand.
Additionally, the premium brand sticking with the less preferred recipe kinda feels pretentious at this point, like they are being ice cream purists or think they know better about what people want, given the higher price.
PC also had their versions of various pop flavours that have colouring on the boxes to make it clear what they were cloning and their Pepsi cola clone was just as good as the real thing but way cheaper.
My guess is that the brand names got stuck from their own popularity. People knew what they tasted like and might have reacted badly if they tried to tweak the recipe, whereas the budget brands were easier to either change or even discontinue and replace with slightly different branding. People were buying them for the price, not the recipe.
And then, after enough experimentation, they were able to figure out something that matched or surpassed the brand names.
In Canada, there’s the PC brand that I always considered a budget brand. Until I worked at an ice cream factory that had their own premium brand but also made some PC flavours. The PC ones looked better than the factory brand ones. The factory did things the old way (where ice cream flavours were still more about the ice cream than extras added) while PC focused more on the extras like cookie dough or chocolate caramel cups. I can only speak for myself, but I’m more into the extras than the ice cream itself, so it felt like PC was more in tune with what I wanted than the premium brand.
Additionally, the premium brand sticking with the less preferred recipe kinda feels pretentious at this point, like they are being ice cream purists or think they know better about what people want, given the higher price.
PC also had their versions of various pop flavours that have colouring on the boxes to make it clear what they were cloning and their Pepsi cola clone was just as good as the real thing but way cheaper.