Two boxes of mini pizzas. Same freezer door. Same frost. Roughly the same twelve discs of dough, sauce and cheese inside.
One has a name that has been on television since you were a kid. The other has a blue and white label that looks like it was designed by a committee trying very hard not to be noticed.
The gap between them is often two dollars.
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The usual explanation is that the cheap one is cheap. Less cheese, sadder pepperoni, you get what you pay for.
That explanation is mostly wrong, and the real answer is far more interesting.
Because Great Value is not a discount label. Walmart calls it its largest private brand and the largest food and consumables CPG brand in the United States.
The largest. In the country. Bigger than the famous ones.
Walmart says Great Value is in nine out of ten US households, and that an average family can save up to 35% versus national brands on a representative basket of food items.
Now the strange part.
Walmart does not make almost any of it.
It does not own the pizza plant. It does not run the cheese line. Outside suppliers manufacture nearly all of it to Walmart's specifications.
So Walmart built the largest food brand in America without building a food company.
How do you do that? By noticing that the expensive part of a frozen pizza was never the pizza.