While scrolling through my Twitter the other day when I should have been doing something much more productive, I came across an ad for $3 organic products.
Heck yeah, I thought to myself. You can't beat that.
But why were organic products so cheap? What strings are going to be pulled? Maybe it's just click bait? Eh, it's worth a shot.
So I clicked and I was taken to a site called brandless.com. Everything was organic, everything was $3, and nothing had a brand associated with it. The labels were simplistic and aesthetically pleasing, the website was easy to navigate, and there was a wide range of options and products. Search filters included "gluten free", "vegan", "non GMO", and "certified kosher".
Basically, Brandless, making its way to the World Wide Web just a few months ago, is a community of people advocating for honesty in this keep-the-consumer-clueless capitalist market. Brandless is here to be honest with its consumers, and by completely eliminating the BrandTax, Brandless is eliminating markups after the products leave the producer.
BrandTax is a tax added onto products sporting well-known brands. Big brands are usually associated with better quality, but that is not true a good majority of the time. Brandless claims they have "estimate[d] the average person pays at least 40% more for products of comparable quality as ours" (taken directly from brandless.com/about).
Being the money frugal college senior that I am, I never really paid attention to brand names anyways. I grew up in a lower middle class household, and we shopped at Aldi. Stumbling upon Brandless felt like I stumbled upon a revolutionary, more consumer conscious online Aldi.
Needless to say, I bought some products…okay, a lot of products, including cookies, pasta sauce, mayonnaise (which my mayonnaise-obsessed boyfriend loves), honey, and much, much more. Everything arrived in a neat little box just a couple days later, and everything was DELICIOUS.
Honestly, the reason I feel that this is so important to share is that people think that eating organic has to be expensive and that you have to travel to a whole foods market to obtain organic products. Truth is, you don’t. Even if the local grocery store doesn’t provide organic or gluten free or kosher products, at least there is a website and movement like Brandless to be utilized.
Heck yeah, I thought to myself. You can't beat that.
But why were organic products so cheap? What strings are going to be pulled? Maybe it's just click bait? Eh, it's worth a shot.
So I clicked and I was taken to a site called brandless.com. Everything was organic, everything was $3, and nothing had a brand associated with it. The labels were simplistic and aesthetically pleasing, the website was easy to navigate, and there was a wide range of options and products. Search filters included "gluten free", "vegan", "non GMO", and "certified kosher".
Basically, Brandless, making its way to the World Wide Web just a few months ago, is a community of people advocating for honesty in this keep-the-consumer-clueless capitalist market. Brandless is here to be honest with its consumers, and by completely eliminating the BrandTax, Brandless is eliminating markups after the products leave the producer.
BrandTax is a tax added onto products sporting well-known brands. Big brands are usually associated with better quality, but that is not true a good majority of the time. Brandless claims they have "estimate[d] the average person pays at least 40% more for products of comparable quality as ours" (taken directly from brandless.com/about).
Being the money frugal college senior that I am, I never really paid attention to brand names anyways. I grew up in a lower middle class household, and we shopped at Aldi. Stumbling upon Brandless felt like I stumbled upon a revolutionary, more consumer conscious online Aldi.
Needless to say, I bought some products…okay, a lot of products, including cookies, pasta sauce, mayonnaise (which my mayonnaise-obsessed boyfriend loves), honey, and much, much more. Everything arrived in a neat little box just a couple days later, and everything was DELICIOUS.
Honestly, the reason I feel that this is so important to share is that people think that eating organic has to be expensive and that you have to travel to a whole foods market to obtain organic products. Truth is, you don’t. Even if the local grocery store doesn’t provide organic or gluten free or kosher products, at least there is a website and movement like Brandless to be utilized.