I was quite surprised to see that this store still sold Lucerne-branded ice cream, using the packaging from the early Lifestyle v2 era, even! I suppose it makes sense that they Sobeys have kept using the graphic design style from when they bought Safeway, but it's still weird to see this, especially since none of the other pre-split Safeway brands remain (Sobeys' store brand is called Compliments, and you can see its design style on the ice cream bars to the left). It's possible that Sobeys even redesigned the Lucerne packaging at some point while still keeping its original styling -- Washington Safeways used cylindrical ice cream containers, but I can't remember if that was true for Canada too, since store-brand dairy packaging is strangely variable across Safeway divisions. It's even weirder to see this now, as Safeway/Albertsons rebranded almost all Lucerne ice cream products (except the giant tubs like the one at the bottom left) as Safeway Select a few years ago.
Here in Houston at least, Randall's does not sell any kind of Lucerne ice cream at all. All the store brand ice cream is under the Signature Select name. Those plastic tub things are sold as Lucerne, but technically that is not ice cream. I think they call it frozen dairy dessert or something. I believe there are federal standards for the amount of creme, or some other dairy product, that must be in ice cream if it is called ice cream. Otherwise, it is fake ice cream and cannot carry the name. The US' standards are actually quite high in this regard, I remember reading about this some time back and the requirement is actually higher in the US than in the EU.
ReplyDeleteStore brand ice cream is a big deal here in Texas even though we have the popular local brand Blue Bell. I suppose Tillamook is the equivalent in the NW, but Tillamook is probably better than Blue Bell. Blue Bell might be the local favorite, but it's also not very good and they had a listeria problem a few years ago which gave the company a black eye.
With this in mind, it's not hard for the store brands to top the 'king' of Texas ice creams. Kroger really used to market an ice cream called Texas Gold. I'm not sure if it was exclusive to Texas, but it was very good. Kroger has moved away from that in recent years, but I feel that HEB built their reputation for their store brand on the back of their HEB Creamy Creations ice cream. HEB has marketed it heavily for years. Safeway is running a bit behind I think. While Lucerne had a good reputation back in the 1980s here for dairy, I'm not sure if Safeway has ever really had an ice cream that people got crazy about here. Maybe I'm forgetting about something. I think their product is fine, they just don't have a way of marketing it.
Interesting, I never realized those giant tubs fell into that technically not ice cream category! I'm used to just seeing that on flavors that have lots of stuff mixed in. I've never paid much attention to those giant containers -- they're too much for me to go through on my own, and are probably too big to even fit in the freezer I have right now!
DeleteSignature Select ice cream is quite good, but I don't think Safeway promotes it all that much here either, other than often having it on sale for quite cheap. It's definitely better than Kroger store brand ice cream! As with a lot of store-brand dairy stuff, there's probably some regional aspect to it -- I know most Safeway-brand ice cream sold around here is made locally, in their large Bellevue plant.
Tillamook is really good, along with Umpqua, the somewhat less major other Northwest brand (which is pretty hard to find in Washington these days -- they made a big push into Washington around 2010, but are now back to mostly just Oregon). For name brand ice cream, I only ever buy Tillamook or Blue Bunny (my absolute favorite, but also quite hard to find), since the other national brands don't really have an edge on Safeway in my opinion.