Consumer brands pre-date the FDA. The earliest adverts for branded foods tended to emphasise purity and safety above any other merit of the product, at a time when adulteration was rife.
In the absence of other oversight, a brand name provided a degree of trust - advertising is a form of costly signalling, indicating that the advertiser is investing in their reputation and would have something to lose by selling a shoddy product. The brand of flour I've never heard of is far more likely to be padded out with gypsum or chalk than the brand of flour that has advertised in the newspaper every week for the last four years.
We're seeing the inverse trend today, with sites like Amazon being flooded with white-label products of unknown safety and quality. In many product categories, there just isn't a brand with widespread recognition, or the sheer number of off-brand products has drowned out the branded products. These white-label sellers have little or nothing to lose if they sell a shoddy or outright dangerous product - they just take down the product listing, put up a new listing and buy enough five star reviews to get the ball rolling again.
"Silver hallmarks in the UK date back to the medieval period and the practice of applying them as a guarantee of the purity of the precious metal represents Britain’s oldest form of consumer protection."
You didn't have mass distribution on the scale you have today without middlemen, and so word-of-mouth and personal recommendations should have probably sufficed for most markets, as they do in some markets today (e.g. job and employment)
In all probability, people's names were their own brands, like they still are in small towns today.
I can imagine two Romans walking down the street, and one saying to the other "Oh our family has been buying meat from Spartacus' family for generations now, they're the best when it comes to that sort of stuff."
I don't know about commercial brands but some gladiators were paid quite handsomely by sponsors[1], not unlike top-tier athletes today (actually, some arguably earned more than modern athletes[2])
The baker down the street was the only "brand" of bread available, I suspect. Although personally knowing who is making the product fulfills a similar function to branding.
In the absence of other oversight, a brand name provided a degree of trust - advertising is a form of costly signalling, indicating that the advertiser is investing in their reputation and would have something to lose by selling a shoddy product. The brand of flour I've never heard of is far more likely to be padded out with gypsum or chalk than the brand of flour that has advertised in the newspaper every week for the last four years.
We're seeing the inverse trend today, with sites like Amazon being flooded with white-label products of unknown safety and quality. In many product categories, there just isn't a brand with widespread recognition, or the sheer number of off-brand products has drowned out the branded products. These white-label sellers have little or nothing to lose if they sell a shoddy or outright dangerous product - they just take down the product listing, put up a new listing and buy enough five star reviews to get the ball rolling again.
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