Private label natural cheese in various forms is growing while many of the top ten name brands are shrinking. Meanwhile, in the frozen novelty category, the most dramatic gains are coming from brands with a health or diet emphasis.

Private label natural cheese in various forms is growing while many of the top ten name brands are shrinking. Meanwhile, in the frozen novelty category, the most dramatic gains are coming from brands with a health or diet emphasis.

A look at the top 10 brands of natural cheese shows that private label natural grew by 12.8% in dollar sales and 15.8% in unit sales during the 52 weeks leading up to Sept. 7. Private label shredded cheese jumped 8.5% and 11.4% in dollar and unit sales respectively. These numbers, from Information Resources Inc., represent total U.S. supermarket, drug and mass merchandiser sales, not including Wal-Mart.

While private label cheese sales are up, leading brands from Kraft and Sargento lost a bit of ground during the same period, although none were down by more than 2.6% in the dollar column.

In the novelty aisle, sales were generally strong for the same period with overall dollar sales growing about 5%. But the real stars in novelties are Silhouette brand and Weight Watchers Smart Ones. As fairly new introductions, the numbers may be a bit of an anomaly, but they have grabbed some market share and are doing remarkably well. Obviously, guilt-free indulgence sells. Meanwhile, several other top brands slipped a bit during the period.

In the whole milk section of the dairy case sales are off slightly, as usual, but there has also been a lot of jockeying for position among the top brands. Most of these are owned (in whole or in part) by Dean Foods, National Dairy or Dairy Farmers of America. The biggest winners were Oak Farms, a Dean brand based in Texas, and Horizon Organic, the major national organic milk brand that is now owned 100% by Dean.

Finally, a look at yogurt brands shows stronger growth in brands than in private label, and the strongest growth is in some of the most innovative, value-added products.

Dannon and Yoplait control all of the top brands, and among the fastest-growing brands are Dannon's Danimals and La Crème. Yoplait's regular brand performed well too, while Dannon's Light ‘N' Fit lost some ground.