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A proliferation of private labels in European food retailing has been evident for several years now. Against this background, the purpose of this paper is to analyse the impact of competition between national brands and private labels on product variety, prices and turnover.

Within the empirical study, a product group from the ready‐meals category is analysed over a total period of six years (between 2000 and 2005) based on scanner data from different German outlet formats. The empirical study contains time series as well as regression analyses.

The empirical results indicate that, in all studied outlet formats, there is evidence of decreasing product variety and increasing prices over time. Moreover, the results show that the turnover in the supermarkets and especially in the hypermarkets is in decline. A positive turnover trend can only be found in the discount stores.

This empirical study is the first that covers such a long period of time (six years) and several outlet formats. Previous studies have mostly been static or short‐term and predominantly only covered one outlet format.