Whose wine is it anyway? Examining private label cask wine ownership among Australian alcohol retailers

Alcohol pricing policies are recognised as effective strategies for reducing consumption and alcohol-related harms, with their strongest impact concentrated across the lowest-priced products. Across many retail markets, low-cost alcohol is increasingly supplied through retailer-owned (private-label) brands, yet there is little research on how ownership structure relates to pricing at the product level.

Product-level pricing data for cask wine sold by major Australian online alcohol retailers over a month were collected through a commercial web-scraping partnership. Products were classified as retailer-owned or independently owned using trademark records and publicly available ownership information. Prices were standardised to price per standard drink, and analyses were run to compare pricing across ownership types.

Retailer-owned products accounted for 42% of all cask wine products listed across major retailers and were consistently and significantly cheaper per standard drink than independently owned products.

The lowest-priced cask wine products sold by major retailers were predominately retailer-owned. These findings suggest that pricing-based alcohol policies targeting cheap alcohol in Australia would likely have a larger impact on retailer-owned private-label products rather than independent brands.