New consumer polling data has found that an overwhelming majority of U.S. supermarket shoppers will continue to buy store-brand products even after the recession ends.

According to the poll, conducted last month by GfK Custom Research North America for the New York-based Private Label Manufacturers Association (PLMA), 91 percent of shoppers said they would keep purchasing store-brand products once the recession is over. Just 8 percent of the consumers polled said they would stop buying such products.

The poll additionally discovered that nine of every 10 shoppers believe that the store-brand products they buy are just as good as, or better than, their national-brand counterparts, and almost half of those polled said they wanted their supermarket to offer a bigger selection of private label products.

Additional results included:

-- Nearly three-fourths (74 percent) of respondents say the recession is a key factor in their decision-making.

-- Well into the recession, shoppers are still changing over to store brands. Thirty-five percent consumers polled are trying store brand products in categories where they had earlier bought only national-brand items.

-- More than three of every 10 shoppers said they’re now buying more store-brand products than they were last year.

The poll is part of the PLMA’s ongoing study, “Store Brands and The Recession,” based on New York-based GfK’s nationwide poll of nearly 800 main household grocery shoppers. This latest research was co-sponsored by Fort Worth, Texas-based Marketing Management, Inc., a sales and marketing company that specializes in store brands.

The full report can be downloaded at http://cli.gs/7zUd69.