Deerfield Trading Company

The Pooj phones it in.

(Walgreens, September 2010)

These days, most stores that market their own store-branded generic merchandise will also have a “high end” version of the generic product, complete with a different hoity-toity name to distinguish it from the regular store-brand generic. Kroger/Ralph’s has Private Selection, Safeway/Vons has Safeway Select, and thus Walgreens has Deerfield. I’ll be the first to admit that I buy store brands to cut costs, and I’ll also be the first to say I’ve generally had success with the hoity-toity store brands – in some cases preferring the store brand hoity-toity-s to the brand name equivalent (e.g., Private Selection ice cream is pretty dang good, as are Safeway Select bottled pasta sauces).

Unfortunately Deerfield Trading Company Old Fashioned Root Beer doesn’t really live up to its hoity-toity credentials, since it doesn’t taste much better than you’d expect from a lower-end generic store brand. The label proudly states that there’s no high fructose corn syrup in the beverage, but they certainly make up for it by adding more sugar. In fact, that’s pretty much all it tastes like, with very little separating it from any other over-sweetened generic soda – in other words, not particularly root beer-y. Now I have not yet tried the regular Walgreens generic root beer, which I’d imagine is the same recipe except with HFCS instead of sugar, but it might be worth doing a side by side comparison, you know, for the betterment of science and … um … stuff…

All in all, I’d rather have a mass market brand name root beer. That’ll earn you a 1.5.