Every supermarket has its Value range. Every supermarket tries to make it as visible as possible to those who’ll buy it, and tries to pretend it doesn’t exist to everyone else.

It was ever thus. How else to balance the lofty desire of An Identity, and the hard-nosed commercial reality of everyone having a different price point? Such conditions lead to the birth of the mongrel value range, and a strange kind of brand schizophrenia.

Waitrose Essentials, a stoic and semi-apologetic line that somehow, works by saying everything without needing to say anything. Tesco Value, which uses its blue-and-white-striped livery as a sort of proud identity, while managing to look like it’s just been liberated from a skip.

Neither have the boyish charm of Sainsbury’s Basics.

If Sainsbury’s is aspirational-yet-accessible Jamie Oliver, Basics is his humble-yet-slightly-unstable younger brother: he’s just discovered scrumpy, he’s saying those Things. The Family Things we weren’t going to say at the reunion.

But this is what works so well about Basics: in every one of those slightly italicised lines, where we’d normally see some blurb with the words “locally sourced” or similar, we get a shared inside joke about the supermarket experience; a little self-aware wink from the brand. Just between you and me, the pack says, I am rather cheap. And we thank it for its candour.

That’s why Basics has a place in the heart of every student. Because it knows where it belongs.

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