The Hidden Brands Behind These Popular Costco Products

Costco — or about half of it — is essentially a grocery store. But it differs from the regular, run of the mill American neighborhood supermarket in a number of meaningful ways. For example, Costco employees check receipts at the exits, and the stores operate on a club model, requiring an annual membership fee to shop its massive, cavernous warehouse-style stores. And unlike supermarkets, which can theoretically offer dozens of versions of one item, Costco chooses value over variety. It's also a bulk-based store, and offering up crates, flats, and cases of products takes up a lot of floor and shelf space in its cleverly unlabeled aisles. The chain generally only ever offers one or two types of the same product at any one time, usually a name brand item, and more often than not, a similar item of matching quality that's part of the family of "Kirkland Signature" products.

That's not some massive company that produces thousands of curiously top-notch items — it's just the name Costco uses for its private label, or store brands (the company once headquartered in Kirkland, Washington). Some Kirkland Signature products are Costco-made, such as its legendary Food Court hot dogs. Many others are produced, semi-secretly, by big, important, famous-name suppliers. Here are some of the companies that are the true producers of those Kirkland Signature items exclusively found at Costco.

It's a little sad and very concerning that when the public usually learns all at once about the generally anonymous suppliers behind big grocery chains' store brands or the generic, no-name products they stock, it's due to a far-reaching food recall. The FDA will help a company issue a recall of a certain item of packaged and processed produce to limit the spread of a food-borne illness like listeria or hepatitis A, and the list of affected products affects multiple store chains and thousands of individual units, all from a non-household-name of a producer. This is precisely what happened in 2019, when it was revealed that Kirkland Signature doesn't make its Costco-only Three Berry Blend, a mix of popular fruits recommended for use in desserts or smoothies, but rather it outsources from a company called Townsend Farms.

One of many Costco recalls that affected millions, the company participated in a recall of its four-pound, sold-frozen Kirkland Signature Three Berry Blend amidst more than 100 people contracting hepatitis A after eating the fruit. The product was sold in southern California, Arizona, New Mexico, and Nevada, and was prepared for the market by Townsend Farms, an Oregon-based industrial fruit operation in business since 1906.

Probably the biggest revolution in home coffee consumption since the introduction of automatic drip coffee makers in the early 1970s, K-Cups changed the way people drink coffee at home. Pioneering the single-cup style, machines made or inspired by Keurig offer the taste and richness of a brewed cup of coffee with the speed and convenience of the instant stuff — such devices make just one serving at a time, pushing water through small plastic containers full of coffee grounds (or hot chocolate mix or tea). They're significantly wasteful, but also costlier than brewing from beans at home, but Costco makes that cheaper for these appliance owners, selling big boxes of house-brand Kirkland Signature K-Cups certified for use with Keurig machines.

There's a reason that Kirkland Signature K-Cups are an officially sanctioned product — they're produced by Keurig Green Mountain. The company that made the first machines and a lot of the product for those coffee brewers still make lots of coffee, including the 120-count Breakfast Blend K-Cups and other types of K-Cups sold exclusively at Costco as Kirkland Signature items.

Costco is a huge operation, consisting primarily of more than 600 extra-large stores the size of warehouses stocked floor to ceiling with merchandise. But it's not so big that it can make for itself all of the products it stocks. In states where it's legal for grocery and variety stores to sell hard alcohol, Costco offers a full selection of primary spirits for stocking a home bar, like vodka, gin, and whisky. It's a very specific and highly regulated process to make and distribute alcohol, and not even Costco is a large enough operation to run multiple industrial-scale distilleries.

So, what appear to be generic, or store-brand, Kirkland-labeled bottles in its alcohol section are actually mid-to-high end products of notable and well-established makers. Kirkland Signature Blended House Whisky is technically and legally scotch because it's made in Scotland, as it's a product of the Scottish distillery Alexander Murray and Co. Costco is actually one of the company's biggest and most reliable customers, moving 100,000 cases' worth a year of the bargain-priced scotch.

Not every Kirkland Signature product offered at Costco is quietly contracted out to name brand manufacturers. Sometimes, Costco will work with lower-tier food manufacturers to concoct clones of well-liked, well-known products. The reason: The industry leader won't do business with Costco, either refusing to stock their items at the warehouse store chain or unwilling to relinquish its famous product name in favor of the Kirkland Signature name.

For example, Costco began selling Huggies brand baby diapers only after that product's manufacturer, Kimberly-Clark, caved following the release and decent sales of strikingly similar Kirkland Signature diapers. Costco also sells Kirkland Signature Nut Bars, essentially a pitch-perfect remake of the nut-and-chocolate-based Kind Bars. Costco previously sold Kind Bars in large boxes at a cost-per-unit of about $1 a bar, until wholesale almond prices fell in 2016. The cheaper expense of that vital Kind Bar ingredient led Costco to stop stocking the name brand version in favor of a clone, which is made by Canadian food packager Leclerc Group. Those bars sell at retail, in Costco under the Kirkland Signature Nut Bar brand, for around half of what the Kind Bars once did.

Tequila is Mexico's famously misunderstood spirit, and to legally be marketed as such, the alcohol made from distilled blue agave has to be produced at a facility in Mexico. This means that the otherwise run-of-the-mill, store-brand, Kirkland Signature Añejo Tequila sold at Costco warehouse stores in states where alcohol can be sold in grocery settings, is actually a legitimate, imported, authentically Mexican tequila, and of some renown. It's even been aged for better flavor — "añejo" translates to "aged."

Costco isn't looking to be overly forthright about exactly where that tequila is made, or by whom. The answers can be found with a bit of digging. Because tequilas have to be certified in their Mexican origin, each bottle produced is emblazoned with a four-digit identification number. That code correlates to its distillery or facility of origin, in Mexico. The one found on bottles of Kirkland Signature Añejo Tequila is 1173, and that corresponds to tequila made at facilities operated by Corporate Distillery Santa Lucia, SA de CV. It's a tequila factory in Tesistan, a city just north of Guadalajara.

The average Costco store devotes several of its refrigerated bays to bacon, that perennially popular breakfast meat and versatile salty and savory ingredient. The warehouse store sells several varieties of name-brand bacon along with a few Kirkland Signature branded types, and in large packages, of course, including Thick Sliced Bacon, Low Salt Bacon, and just plain regular sliced bacon that's been "naturally hickory smoked."

It would take one of the United States' biggest pork producers to keep all those hundreds of bulk-selling Costcos perpetually well stocked with all of that Kirkland bacon. The warehouse store network's customers buy so much bacon that Costco has to work with multiple meat suppliers to keep up. About 75% to 80% of all Kirkland Signature bacon is made by Smithfield, a significant macro-meat producer whose name-brand bacon sells at other national stores like Kroger and Target. It's also considered a higher-end bacon, which means Kirkland Signature bacon is a name-brand good in store-brand packaging and at a cut-rate price. That is, if a customer gets that Smithfield-made bacon in their cart. The rest of the 20% or so of Costco's bacon comes from a network of other, smaller, lesser-known pork producers.

In variety packs or in single-flavor portable suitcases, Costco moves a lot of Kirkland Signature beer. Presented as akin to small-batch beers big on flavor, hops, mouthfeel, and ABV, Kirkland Signature beers offer many styles to suit many beer lovers' preferences, and they taste like authentic craft beverages or microbrews. Pilsner, session, American pale ale, India pale ale, porter, and brown ale may be available at any given time and for significant cost savings against what one might pay for name-brand local or regional beers at a grocery or convenience store.

The recipes for these seemingly and outwardly generic beers provide repeatable results, because Costco relies on several breweries across the country to produce its Kirkland Signature craft beers. According to the label on Kirkland beers sold in the far west, they're made by the Hopfen Und Malz Brewing Company. That place bears the same San Jose, California, address as another, larger corporate brewery: Gordon Biersch. But those same beers in the same flavors may be found at Costco stores on the East Coast, where labels indicate an origin at the Bricks and Barley Brewing Company out of Stevens Point, Wisconsin, and/or Matt Brewing in Utica, New York. Another brewery, Regal Brau of Wisconsin, is also a legally registered Kirkland partner, suggesting it makes Costco's beers, too, and also in secret.

Certainly one of the most pleasant parts of a Costco trip is stocking up on the snacks. The warehouse store favored by families and offices alike offers many different tubs, boxes, and parcels full of chocolate-based items, whether the sweet and velvety stuff is the basis of a cookie or candy and enrobing a nut or fruit. Costco's in-house label Kirkland Signature is the brand listed on items like Milk Chocolate Raisins, Milk Chocolate Almonds, and chocolate-oriented Macadamia Clusters. If customers have ever noticed that the chocolate used always kind of tastes the same, that's because a lot of it comes from the same place.

Since 2013, the Blommer Chocolate Company has been the chocolate supplier of record for certain and various Kirkland Signature sweets. Not as well known as other chocolatiers like Nestle or Hershey's (which some people think tastes like puke), the 1939-founded Blommer purports to be the biggest chocolate producer in North America. In part because it requires so much chocolate for all of its many snacks and desserts, Costco works with Blommer on sustainability measures and fair farming practices in the Ivory Coast.

There's such a strong customer demand for Costco's Albacore Solid White Tuna in Water that it's the rare store-brand item available outside of its home store, even sold via Amazon.com. It even ranks near the top of ultimate rankings of canned tuna brands, or it would, if it were presented to the public under its true name.

Carrying a light, pleasant seafood flavor, solid white tuna is meatier, firmer, and chunkier than chunk light tuna, which is both overtly and pungently fishy as well as stringy and mushy. Choosing solid white albacore, a premium product, is to pick a higher quality tuna anyway, even if one opts for the Kirkland Signature store brand. It may cost about the same or even less than a similar product by a well-known and trusted canned tuna packager, like Bumble Bee. Customers might as well pick the Kirkland Signature Albacore Solid White Tuna in Water over the Bumble Bee in a similarly colored and designed can — it's the same fish.

Concerned that its customers would be deeply disappointed by four different lots of a product produced and sold in the early fall of 2022, Costco issued a recall. According to a letter sent to Costco members, Kirkland Signature Shelled Walnuts — chopped roughly and packaged as halves and pieces — may have harbored a "stale taste and rancid smell." Those who'd purchased the 3-pound bags of otherwise unbranded nuts were invited to take back the unused portion of affected bags to their local Costco store and get their money returned to them.

The recall letter was issued by Costco but written and sent by a representative of the party responsible for the off-tasting and poor-smelling walnuts. William Cox Thornton III, general manager of Mid Valley Nut, a California-based industrial nut producer provider, sent off the letter. Mid Valley Nut is just one of Costco's many nut suppliers. The warehouse chain gets its product from a network of farms in California, Peru, Mexico, and Hawaii.

A group of dairy farmers created a co-op in 1929, which became Humboldt Creamery, one of the most highly regarded milk producers on the West Coast. The California operation, now a part of Crystal Creamery, makes just seven dairy products, but one of them is Humboldt Creamery Super Premium Vanilla Ice Cream, a thick, rich dessert made from little more than real cream, sugar, milk, egg yolks, and authentic vanilla. By 2006, shortly after acquiring several other smaller, regional dairies to bolster its production capabilities, Humboldt was supplying Costco with its house label vanilla ice cream. Its Super Premium Vanilla Ice Cream is one and the same as the Kirkland Signature Super Premium Vanilla Ice Cream.

"It's in every one of their stores," CEO Rich Ghilarducci told the North Coast Journal. "We ship it into Europe for them and into Mexico, Asia." Humboldt once provided the supplies needed to make ice cream bars once sold at the Costco Food Court.

Batteries aren't food, but they are a kitchen essential. So many food prep gadgets require some AA or AAA batteries that it's good to have them on hand and buy them in bulk for relatively cheap at a store like Costco so they're ready to go for any household purpose — or just sitting for months in that kitchen junk drawer. A large, long piece of cardboard covered in dozens of batteries held in place with a plastic shell is a common cart addition at Costco with little attention paid beyond its unbeatable per-unit price. There isn't a lot of price comparison possible at Costco, where generally very few types of similar products are stocked, but it turns out that such a chore isn't even necessary because one of the most recognized names in batteries is a Costco supplier. Kirkland Signature Batteries, in all voltages and sizes, are a product of Duracell.

"Now, this brand here is no advertising, there's no overhead, there's just packaging. We don't advertise it. It's just a brand," Costco CEO Craig Jelinek told WSB-TV in 2016 of all Kirkland Signature products, before revealing that the real brand behind the batteries is one of the biggest in the retail world.

Many foods that are traditionally grown, produced, or prepared in Europe, and have been for hundreds of years, are so vital to the local and regional economies that they're safeguard by international law. In 2009, balsamic vinegar earned such protected geographic indication. This means that for that rich and flavorful salad dressing element, condiment, and cooking ingredient to be to authentically and legally carry that distinction in stores in Europe and the United States, it has to be produced in the Modena region of Italy. Founded in 1906, Acetum claims to be the world's top producer of balsamic vinegar, making the product via traditional and sustainable methods. Because its operations are based in Modena, it's a certified balsamic vinegar producer.

This means the Kirkland Signature branded balsamic vinegar commonly available throughout Costco's network of stores is true balsamic vinegar. It may say Kirkland Signature on the bottle, but it's produced for the chain by Acetum.