Aldi USA is connected to Aldi Süd, but they really don’t share many suppliers. USA stores don’t get much in the way of German products, but there’s some stuff (chocolate, wine, possibly coffee) obviously from European producers. And they bring in a few things under the Deutsche Kuche brand that seems to be pretty authentically German, including stollen and the like at Christmas. Over Christmas we found some surprisingly classy cheeses.
Alas, no quality bread yet in the US stores. All bread seems to come from ordinary local bakeries, the same puffy soft stuff that’s in other wrappers at the Jewels and the Dominicks.
One thing I find hilarious is the sheer number of store brands they’ve invented for the various categories. You’d think they could just put “Aldi” on all of it. My only theory is that if there’s ever an incident that requires a product recall or tarnishes one of the store brands, they don’t want entire stores full of product to have to be discarded.
Yeah. Just because it’s not name-brand doesn’t mean it’s crappy. All the stuff is as decent as your regular store brand or in some cases better. I hear their brownie mix is fantastic as is their ham.
Yes! The spiral ham is very reasonable in price and just as delicious as any found anywhere! … Half price Avocados, $1.99 chunks of cheese, brown gravy packets for 35 cents, the big variety of big chocolate bars, a big jar of honey for less than $5, rye bread seeded or seedless for $1.00, cheapcheapcheap paper goods - god, I LOVE Aldi’s.
I think it’s more fair to say that they seldom have bakery style bread. Their 12 grain (or whatever they call it - it’s heartier than the whole wheat they also offer) is as good as Pepperidge Farm or what have you (and has twice the fiber of many prepacked “healthy” breads), but yes, you’re not going to find a nice sourdough baked thi s morning in a crinkly paper wrapper. They do sometimes have half sized baguette, though.
I think they’re just trying to look more like a store with lots of options, and they hope people don’t notice that they’re all packed and distributed by Aldi (although that information is on the back of the labels.)
Oh! Have they all started stocking Sweet Baby Ray’s BBQ sauce, or only my store? Gods, I love that stuff, and it’s almost half the price of the big grocery stores.
Aldi’s brownies with an additional 1/2 tsp vanilla extract is my “secret” recipe for brownies. We’ve tried every brand, and every scratch recipe we can get our hands on, and we keep going back to Aldi’s. Wanna try something really decadent? One package brownie mix, one package cheesecake mix, both Aldi’s house brand. Bake the brownies (adding a little vanilla) and cool in the pan. Make the cheesecake goo (sprinkle in some chocolate chips if you’re feeling adventurous) and smear the goo over the cooled brownies still in the pan. Chill and devour.
I like my local Aldis. It does very good basics that are really, really cheap, and random stuff. A big jar of artichoke hearts for less than a pound? They go mad sometimes (or perhaps that is Lidl? same difference) with special promotions. Horse-riding gear? Yes, I’ve been needing a new bridle! Perhaps a chainsaw? A surfboard?
You’ll notice that the OP was written in suburban Chicago. Yes, the bread is Deutsche Kuche, but it’s usually here.
I look forward to Save-A-Lot to wend its way into the Western Burbs. If they have a salt-free V8 equivalent my wife will only shop there. She doesn’t usually have a problem with salt (“That’s why God gave us kidneys.”) but the amount of V8 she can drink at a sitting would cause any god to say, “I didn’t plan around THAT.”
Hmmm, looking closer, Save-A-Lot is owned by Supervalu, so its generics may taste just like Jewel’s. Not a goal to reach for. But, with Aldi HQed in Batavia and Jewel in Itasca, the turf war over the far-west burbs has already been going on for years and this might upset the detante, in which Aldi gets the low end and Supervalu/Albertsons/Jewel gets the middle.
We get most of our shopping in Aldi or Lidl. I can’t recommend it enough. High quality, cheap, and for the non-German stuff they have more local suppliers than many of the other supermarkets.
That might be more related to the strategy of Aldi back home in Germany, to imitate a known label e.g. Danone for milk products with a similar-looking and sounding label so customers wouldn’t be ashamed when using the product in front of their friends (who went to normal stores).
There are several ALDIdente books on how to cook nice meals with just the Aldi ingredients*, and they mention that when you entertain snobbish relatives who look down their noses at shopping at Aldi, to quietly unpack the Aldi stuff in the kitchen, let them sample and tell them afterwards “by the way, the salmon was from Aldi…”
a bit of a challenge since part of Aldi’s concept is to limit the number of items they carry to reduce costs. So instead of 20 different kinds of cheese from half a dozen companies, they will have 5 kinds from one brand (their own). IIRC they started with 700 items total, and later raised it a bit to 1200. So getting basic stuff is easy, but the extra flourishes of cuisine, like herbs, special mustard, exotic stuff, will not be there. So the cookbook describes how to get around that problem.
There were several court trials - and threats of trials - over the decades when brand name felt that Aldi was too closely imitating them.
BTW, the German consumer agency Stiftung Warentest has repeadtly tested Aldi products when they test food and they always get good grades for quality.
Cite? My own experience says that yes, for the most part, they do. We grew pineapples in the backyard in my childhood. We picked them when the “eyes” were around the same size, and the colour was stating to change.
I’ve seen pineapples in stores here in CA which were obviously picked too early - the eyes aren’t even, and there’s no hint of gold in the green. THESE pineapples will not ripen.
The promotions are twice a week here, and several years back someone published a book so you can look up which calendar week certain items are likely to come up (after slogging through years of “special offers.”) So in spring, there will be bike stuff and gardening; in autumn, cold-weather bike stuff (like full-hand gloves - very nice and warm! instead of the usual cut-off gloves for summer); notebooks and computers are at another time; bikes will come a bit later…
Chainsaws are part of the garden stuff, but surfboards and riding-gear I haven’t seen yet. But I remember tennis and golf stuff - probably because more clubs are offering it cheap instead of exclusive.
To explain the apostrophe-s: Presumably, the store was founded by someone named Aldi. Whose store is it? It’s Aldi’s store. And in fact, many business names in the US really are the founder’s name followed by an apostrophe-s. For instance, Sneed’s Feed and Seed would be the feed and seed store owned by Sneed. So when we encounter any business that looks like it was named after its founder, we assume it follows the same pattern.
That’s exactly what it is but they try to have good stuff instead of Chinese guess-the-ingredient lottery food.
You have to know what everything should cost ahead of time and look for bargains instead of going with a shopping list. you’re not going to get everything on your shopping list. It just pisses me off to go there because I want to get in, finish my shopping list and go home. I’m not into store hopping.
Do you write specific brands onto your shopping list, or the type of item (sausage, sugar)? Because if you need certain kind of items, you can usually find them at Aldi.
And why do you need to know how much it costs beforehand? Do you mean comparing prices between different supermarkets? Or something different?