That's a fairly common reply now when a small overseas brand pitches to one of Austria's big supermarket chains. The supermarket likes the product, but they just don't want your name on it. GourmetPro expert Kathryn Read hears a version of it often when she brings clients through the door.

And there's a good reason for that. Some big multinationals sell the same branded goods to Austrian retailers at higher wholesale prices than they charge in Germany. They also restrict retailers from simply buying the cheaper German stock instead. Austria's competition authority puts the gap at 15-20% or more, and on the shelf it shows. In May 2026, the Labour Chamber found 69 identical branded foods cost about 26% more online at Billa and Interspar than at Rewe and Globus in Germany. The brands blame higher Austrian costs and powerful retailers. Either way, the retailers' response is the same: if you can't buy the brand at a fair price, you replace it.

Parts one and two of this private label series covered France and foodservice. This third and final instalment looks at Europe's biggest grocery market, Germany, alongside its neighbor Austria: two markets that look alike from the outside but work very differently. Kathryn walks us through the Austrian shelves, and GourmetPro expert Giles Pickles, who has spent 36 years building F&B brands and private label businesses, shows us how Germany compares.

Brands often treat Austria as an extension of Germany. "Just like another province," Kathryn says, "and it doesn't work like that." A first-time visitor would see the same logos and roughly the same products, but the difference is in the weighting. For instance, Germany might only have two organic and eight conventional options, while Austria would probably have more like six organic and maybe four conventional.

Around 95% of Austrian grocery sits with just a handful of companies, higher even than markets like Estonia, Kathryn said. If you won just one buyer, you could be in front of a third of the country. And if you lose one, there's no long tail to fall back on.

Austrian own brands sell on origin and quality, not just price. About 20 years ago, Kathryn says, supermarkets started splitting their own brands into a basic tier and an organic one. Today Billa sells milk in three own-brand levels, and even discounter Hofer has run an organic, Austrian-origin line since 2006. "If you go into an Aldi in Germany, it feels much more like a hard discounter than if you go into a Hofer in Austria."

The discounters are almost all own label: more than 90% of Hofer's standard range and about 80% of Lidl's (CASH/GS1). If you want to sell to either, you need to be offering private label.

And not all own label looks like own label. Austrian chains sell wine and spirits made exclusively for them by well-known producers, usually "a less expensive version of something that they can just produce in a large quantity," under names that never mention the supermarket. "You wouldn't look at a bottle of beer or a bottle of wine and say that's private label." This beer is brewed by Austrian breweries, and "if you ask an Austrian, they would rather drink that than they would drink a Heineken or an American beer," Kathryn said. Billa's exclusive line of regional specialities, like Belgian truffles and Lübeck marzipan, used to appear only at Christmas. Now it turns up year-round, tested as in-and-out promotions.

That local story is fiercely guarded. The AMA quality seal demands fully Austrian raw materials, and farmers publicly call out retailers who cut corners. A foreign supplier isn't going to win the milk, for example.

Neither is anything that looks like "fake food". Austria has seen a big rise in vegetarians, but veganism is still seen as something quite unusual, and "people don't want to have fake food. It doesn't matter whether it's meat or vegan." So own-brand tofu, tempeh, and soya chunks are now on Austrian shelves, while Germany's wall of plant-based burgers hasn't made the same crossing.

Buying is national, too. Kathryn highlighted how some retailers buy only a few lines globally, like the staples sold in every outlet across Europe. Others are bought country by country, "because the national ranges are so different everywhere."

So the opening is everything Austria doesn't grow or make. Look at what's arrived in own label lately: soy sauce, sweet chili sauce, tortillas, egg noodles, tahini, peanut purée, even bubble tea. To Kathryn, "it feels less opportunistic, it feels much more strategic."

Some of it follows who lives in Austria now. Since Syrian refugees arrived in 2013 and 2014, Kathryn said she could buy two or three kinds of tahini, including an own-label one, at the supermarket. She used to have to buy it, expensively, at a health food shop. Some of it follows breakfast habits. Where there used to be one peanut butter brand, every major chain now sells an own-brand peanut purée with no sugar or salt, and in an organic version too. The name shifts it from sandwich spread to cooking ingredient.

The own-label versions may not be truly authentic either. Kathryn has tried supermarket brand taco and fajita spice mixes and said she wouldn't buy them a second time, but for a family "looking to get the kids to try something new," they're a good entry point because they're not so authentic and unapproachable. In a new category, own label's job is to be the safe first step, not the best version.

Just know that your trial listing may become their research. A niche Italian snack got a trial listing at Kathryn's local Billa. Weeks later it was being sold off at a 30% discount, with a Billa Bio own-brand version on the shelf right underneath.

Bubble tea followed the same path. Kathryn's supermarket used to stock a branded one. This summer, an own-brand version appeared in the supermarket's magazine. "It looks exactly like the one they had as a branded product. So I'm assuming this is a replacement."

That's where "make us an offer" comes from. Retailers want the innovation, but "they're trying to go private label first."

Four groups (Edeka, Schwarz, Rewe, and Aldi) account for more than 85% of German grocery revenue. Germany's big groups split their buying between formats, regions, and even individual store owners. Edeka is a cooperative: about 3,200 independent merchants generate EUR42.7 billion of its EUR77.3 billion turnover. Lidl and Kaufland share a parent but are separate pitches. And Aldi Süd and Aldi Nord divide the country between them, with their own buyers.

Germany is also a famously tight-fisted market. Germans spend just 22.2% of their consumption in retail, the lowest share in the EU (the EU average is 31.9%).

Price first, but premium is where the growth is. Own label now averages 47% market share across categories, up from 41% in 2021, and makes up almost 30% of Rewe's supermarket sales. In 2025, premium own label grew 11.2%, against 3.6% for premium brands. The Consumer Index for January 2026 showed an 11.6% increase in volume and 18.3% increase in revenue for private label confectionery.

GourmetPro expert Giles Pickles sees it in his own shopping basket. In cold cuts and foreign cheese, "we never buy anything that's not private label. You don't need to go for Galbani mozzarella, because you know that the Aldi one is as good." Shoppers don't know the imported brands well enough to pay extra for them, but they trust the retailer.

Retailers are chasing the same trends as everyone else. On German shelves, Giles sees make-at-home kits ("things they can buy as a pack, make something at home, and then generally video it and show it to a friend"), zero sugar coasting across every category (one German cola now claims its zero version outsells the full-sugar one), and plant milks pushed so hard that "it's very difficult to find real milk." Organic, he reckons, has stalled at around a fifth of the market, unlike in Austria.

In Austria, origin locks you out. In Germany, the retailer's own factory might. Schwarz Produktion, which makes products for Lidl and Kaufland, reported a turnover of EUR4.6 billion in 2024-25 from drinks, ice cream, chocolate, bakery, a coffee roastery processing more than 50,000 tons, and a pasta plant covering about an eighth of the German market. Edeka's production arm makes more than EUR5 billion from 43 sites.

Rewe is going the other way, handing its bread production to an outside bakery. Chilled is the other no-go for exporters. "The best-before dates are so short that they need local suppliers," Giles says. Frozen can work "if you can master the cold chain," because shelf lives run to around two years, in line with ambient goods.

The biggest opening in Germany is on cost. Retailers are said to be squeezing private label suppliers hard and sourcing is moving abroad, particularly to Eastern Europe. Between 2020 and 2024, Lidl's own-label suppliers from Poland rose 37.5%, Czechia 33.3%, Romania 25%, and Croatia 66.7% (from a small base), while Spain and Turkey also gained importance. Standardized mass-produced goods move abroad first, while premium, innovations, and data-driven development are more likely to remain in Germany.

Origin is the second opening. German supermarkets organize much of their food by where it comes from. Buyers expect their prosciutto to come from Italy and basmati from India, because they can charge a premium on that. Germany makes cured ham too, but Giles has seen Rewe sell it as German cured meat, with a completely different positioning. Heavy staples like flour go to local mills because freight is expensive, but there's space for Italian manufacturers to come in on more specialized products like pizza flour.

Snacks from outside Europe are the third. In private label, Giles calls the crisp aisle "completely commoditized... all of the innovation and value creation has gone out of that." The room is in exotic, non-European snacking, something like an organic, vegan tempura snack, which is new and trending, and which "people can relate to because they've seen it in restaurants." He's watching ube too, the purple yam from the Philippines touted as the next matcha.

The other opening is wherever brands overplay their hand on price. Every stand-off, whether Edeka vs Storck or Rewe vs the chocolate makers, leaves a gap on the shelf for own label to fill.

Both markets remember who's committed. Spar once made suppliers print "produced by [brand] for Spar" on its own-label packs, Kathryn recalls. "Of course they all hated it." Spar learnt that brands "would only produce for them when they were desperate to fill their capacity," and dropped the line as soon as business picked up. The idea was scrapped within a year or two.

Brand fights help private label on both sides of the border. When Austrian dairy NÖM stopped delivering its branded milk to Spar in a price row in 2024-25, it kept making Spar's own-brand dairy the whole time, in fact in larger volumes than its branded products.

And the two markets are more connected than they look: Aldi's long-term milk contracts for Germany are negotiated by Aldi Global Sourcing in Salzburg.

Retailers in both countries want innovation, and private label is increasingly how they get it. But private label brand ranges are built partly on what brands bring through the door: the pitches, the trial listings, the in-and-out promotions. If the innovators are replaced too fast, they may stop knocking.

"It's one thing to offer your own pasta or your own rice," Kathryn says. "It's interesting to me that retailers are starting to replace niche items with their own label. I'm not sure if that's also one of these things that might be short-lived, because otherwise people will stop giving them things that look innovative."

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