Anyone familiar with the early growth of store brands knows the name of Herb Shuster. For manufacturers and retailers alike, during the industry’s formative years, the name Dr. Herbert V. Shuster would become synonymous with private label’s aspirations of quality and comparability to national brands. Through his company, Shuster Laboratories—which he founded in 1955—Herb dedicated his professional career to developing scientific methodologies and establishing industry standards for product specification and testing. By the late 50s and early 1960s, he was already playing a significant role in the development of store brands. Herb served as mentor for literally hundreds of senior industry executives, as he consulted with manufacturing companies to improve the quality of their products and also with retailers to help them build their private label programs. At a time when retailers’ store brands were often perceived as lesser quality he recognized that marketability for private label was inevitably linked to marketability of the national brands, and he reasoned that success in private label could be advanced as a result of benchmarking the testing and evaluation of products to measurable parameters of national brand equivalency.

The science of quality assurance became the cornerstone of his business, and the success of that vision in turn provided a key guiding principle around which young industry could coalesce. His efforts gave greater credibility to private label products, they raised the level of quality for the industry as a whole by establishing the kinds of testing protocols that were required to set quality levels for the industry as a whole, and by enabling retailers to give assurance to the consumer that their store brand products were directly comparable to the leading national brands. If consumers could be led accept that assurance and the product then delivered on that expectation, then private label became a success.

Together with Private Label Magazine publisher Ed Williams, Herb also was among the manufacturers and suppliers who, in 1979, founded the Private Label Manufacturers Association in New York City. He retired from the business and sold Shuster Laboratories to Hauser Corporation in 1995.