A founder emailed me recently asking if I could introduce her to an Aldi buyer. I couldn't, and I ended up writing her a long reply instead, and this post is that reply with the typos taken out. One confession before any of it, because people tend to assume otherwise. Aldi is the single big retailer I never pitched myself. The buyer meetings in my LoveRaw years were Tesco, Asda, Waitrose, Boots, Co-op, Carrefour. Never Aldi. So everything below is watched and second hand rather than lived, and you should weight it accordingly.
Right. The reply, more or less as sent.
The first thing I told her was to stop picturing a Tesco meeting with cheaper biscuits, because it is not that. A normal Aldi store carries something like 1,800 lines. A big four superstore carries tens of thousands. And Aldi does more than 10 per cent of UK grocery on that tiny range, which, if you sit and do the division, tells you what one facing on that shelf is expected to produce.
Also, and I put this line in bold in the email, roughly 90 per cent of the range is own label or exclusive brands. Read that again if you need to. So how many branded slots does that leave in her category? A handful. Maybe fewer. And the brand holding one wakes up every Monday next to an own label twin whose price Aldi decides over breakfast.
Worth knowing they're in the middle of a building spree as well. Over 1,000 UK stores at the last count, something like 40 more coming this year, £370m set aside for it, and they've said out loud they want 1,500. New shelves, in other words, that somebody has to fill.
How do they actually buy, then. By commodity, is the short answer, and cost price carries more weight in that conversation than anything else, at least going by what suppliers who deal with them tell me. Here's the strange part though, and I didn't believe it until I went and looked it up. Aldi keeps coming top of the Groceries Code Adjudicator's supplier survey. That's the anonymous one, suppliers rating the retailers they sell to. You'd assume a discounter would be miserable to supply. The people actually supplying them keep saying the opposite. I have a theory about this. It might be rubbish, an actual Aldi supplier is welcome to correct me, but here it is: the pain all happens before you ever meet them. They agree a cost once. They buy long. They pay when they said they would. That last one sounds like nothing. It is not nothing. Ask anyone who's spent six weeks chasing one invoice around a big four accounts department. And if your cost price never worked, well, you never got in the room, did you.
Specialbuys, the famous middle aisle, is the other thing to understand. New products land every Thursday and Sunday and sell while stocks last, and this is effectively where Aldi tries things out. A short run through real tills, with no promises made in either direction. Penrhos Gin got in through the spirits competition Aldi ran in 2021 and their first order was 18,000 bottles. I still think about that number whenever a founder tells me they're ready for retail off the back of a few hundred units a month.
Three ways in, as far as I could work out for her, and I'll say again that I'm reporting here rather than remembering.
The portal is the obvious one, aldisuppliers.co.uk, and I sat down and went through that form once for somebody else's brand purely to see what it asked. Step one wants to know which commodity and sub-commodities you belong to, and that innocent little question is where I think people come unstuck, because you have to answer it the way their buying departments are organised rather than the way your brand deck is organised, and those two things are almost never the same shape.
Then there's the television, which I'd have found funny once and don't any more. Aldi's Next Big Thing came back in February 2026 as Aldi: The Next Big Seller on Channel 4, Julie Ashfield is on the judging panel, she's their chief commercial officer, and whoever wins it gets shelves in more than 1,080 stores. What stopped me laughing was being told that products from the earlier series sold out within days of their episodes going out. I still have no real idea how you plan production against that, and I doubt the founders did either.
And then the supplier programmes, which are the most overlooked of the three, probably because there's no camera crew attached to them. Grow with Aldi runs every year in Ireland with Bord Bia, the 2025 round put 30 producers and 54 products into 164 stores for a two-week trial, and the UK has run versions of its own that feed their winners into Specialbuys. Those windows shut fast. I've watched a founder find out about a deadline a fortnight after it closed, and that is a miserable way to lose a year.
Which brings us to the deck. She had one already, and it was a nice deck, and most of it was useless for this. I sent her back to the piece I wrote on why Tesco rejected your deck, same idea, every retailer reads slide one through its own lens and she was holding a deck built for somebody else's. Aldi's lens is cost and capacity. Can you make their cost price work at their volumes and still have something left over for yourself, using factory gate numbers you'd bet your house on rather than the ones in your forecast. I've watched buyers at other retailers pull apart a costings slide in the time it took my coffee to go cold, and those were the polite ones. Everyone I've asked says Aldi is faster and doesn't bother being polite. Could you supply the whole estate from week one? Not in theory, actually. Where does the extra line capacity come from, who are the co-packers, what happens to the reorder if the thing flies. And the question nobody likes. Why you? The category might only have a handful of branded slots and somebody already holds the one you want. An award can do it. A proven rate of sale somewhere else is stronger. Best of all is a claim their own label can't copy, which hardly anyone has. All the stuff that fills a normal deck, the mission page and the founder story and the market map, gets flicked past like adverts.
One more question from the reply, an uncomfortable one. If they said no to the brand but offered exclusive own label production instead, would you take it? More founders say yes to that than would admit it at a networking event, and some of them have built very good businesses that way.
And the last thing I told her, which I'd tell you too: don't go to Aldi first. Her margin, and I told her this straight, only works at boutique pricing for now, like most premium challenger brands. I've watched a discounter listing eat a P&L. It took about a year, start to finish, and for most of that year the founder was still telling people the listing was the best thing that ever happened to the brand. Get the production cost down, then go. Aldi will still be there, probably with 40 more stores than when you started.
Oh, and if it's really discounters in general you're thinking about rather than Aldi specifically, I did a separate Lidl guide. From the car park the two look like the same shop. From the supplier side they aren't, quite. And a small plug, since this is my blog after all. This exact failure is half the reason I built DeckSmith. A founder builds one deck, sends it everywhere, and when the discounters go quiet decides they just don't talk to small brands. They talk. Not to that deck though. So it makes a different deck for each retailer. The Aldi deck opens on the numbers. You can guess why by now. Between them those decks have gone on to generate close to £16 million in retailer sales, and no, the deck is not the whole job, nothing here is a magic bullet, but it is usually the first thing a buyer ever sees of your brand and it gets treated as an afterthought far too often. Between them those decks have gone on to generate close to £16 million in retailer sales, and no, the deck is not the whole job, nothing here is a magic bullet, but it is usually the first thing a buyer ever sees of your brand and it gets treated as an afterthought far too often.
