Target's New Grocery Brand: What You Need To Know About Favorite Day

On April 5, Target will launch their new private label Favorite Day. The focus of the label, as they explain in the press release announcing the brand, is to feature 700 types of sweet and savory snacks, from baked goods to candy to mocktails, none of which will cost more than $15. The brand will include two product lines: Favorite Day Bakery, which will focus on baked goods and bread, and Favorite Day Gourmet, which will focus on high-quality sweets.

"We're thrilled to build on Good & Gather's success and the strength of Target's food and beverage business by debuting our new owned brand, Favorite Day," Rick Gomez, Target's executive vice president and chief food and beverage officer, said. Good & Gather, as Forbes writes, is another Target brand that packages self-styled premium grocery items like pasta sauces, pizza, and coffee.

With the creation of Favorite Day, Target has, by the reckoning included within their press release, reached 45 private labels. Thirty of these, as the Forbes piece notes, have been created over the last five years. Each of these brands has been made to address a very specific Target customer need. 

The purpose behind creating such an array of brands instead of rolling them into one is to give the appearance of a full, curated space. Talking on The Motley Fool in 2018, editor Dan Kline expressed how, "If you've been to a Target, you may have noticed that it's no longer just a collection of merchandise. It is a very carefully curated set of different brands." Target has filled every possible need with a product boasting a brand identity built from the ground up.

The importance of this is that when Favorite Day launches, the sweets and snacks you can buy will boast a greater veneer of exclusivity. This reasoning also operated behind the launch of their Good & Gather brand, according to ModernRetail. Part of this strategy's success you can see in the released images of Favorite Day products: the packaging. Branding Times highlighted the work Target puts into branding its private label products so that they appear not cheaper but with a better value: "Customers don't see these 'store brand products' as cheap knockoffs of national brands — rather, these products feel specialized and exclusive, which is vital for driving shopper loyalty." 

As the press release mentions, customers can expect sweets like "dairy-free frozen dessert bars, caramel macchiato trail mix, [and] mini everything bagel croissants." Whether Favorite Day manages to instill loyalty remains to be seen, but Target will almost certainly create a new brand if they feel Favorite Day has missed a need.