Someone asked me last month, a founder I'd been emailing on and off, whether Lidl was actually worth pitching at all, or whether discounters generally were, and this is his phrase not mine, where brands go to die, and I've been turning that over ever since he said it, because the amount of attention founders give these retailers seems to me to be roughly upside down. I get ten Tesco questions for every Lidl one, while Lidl went past Morrisons in the spring, fifth biggest supermarket in Britain now, 8.7 per cent of the market on Kantar's June numbers, more than a thousand stores. Backwards, in my view, the whole ratio.
Let me tell you what a discounter shelf actually is, because I don't think founders picture it right, or at least the founders who email me don't. A Lidl store carries about 2,000 lines, and the Tesco Extra where you filmed your product for Instagram carries tens of thousands, and two thirds of what goes through a Lidl till, roughly, is own label. So the branded slots are properly scarce, and the buyer who controls them has sat through a hundred origin stories by now, a hundred grandmothers' recipes, probably more than that, and I'd genuinely promise you that some of those stories moved them, buyers are human beings whatever the trade press implies, it's just that being moved didn't persuade them of anything, because feeling something about a brand and actually signing a listing form turn out to be different activities, done in what I suspect are entirely different parts of the brain.
Before we go much further I want to be straight with you about my own experience here, partly because it matters to how you weigh everything that follows, and partly because an awful lot of the listing advice floating around comes from people who are, quietly, and I'm trying to be polite about this, pretending they sat in rooms they were never actually in. I never pitched Lidl myself. My meetings over the years were Tesco, Asda, Waitrose, Boots, Co-op, Carrefour, all those little rooms with the bad coffee and a buyer who had usually seen four other brands that same morning, and what I know about Lidl I know more the way a neighbour knows your garden, which is to say from over the fence, but paying fairly close attention for a long time. But buying is buying, and a buyer anywhere lives or dies by whether they can defend a number at range review, and discounters run the same religion with less forgiveness in it.
Here's why you'd put up with that. A permanent listing at Lidl generally means every store in the country from week one. Every store. Four units a store a week, hardly heroic, across a thousand stores comes out over 200,000 units a year, from one SKU, and I raised money on forecasts smaller than that. So yes, the cost conversation will hurt. It's allowed to hurt, look what it buys.
Now the practical bit, and it's duller than people hope. There is no accelerator programme for Great Britain. Kickstart, which founders have usually half heard of, is Ireland and Northern Ireland only, GB has no version, stop looking for it. GB gets a supplier information page on the corporate site, a supplier pack you can download, and a contact form through to the buying team, category by category. Boring. Also the entire route, so read the pack, twice, before you send anything, and I mean read it properly, at a desk, not skimmed on your phone between meetings. It's Lidl explaining how Lidl wants to be supplied, and ignoring it is like turning up to Dragons' Den, which I have actually done, without knowing what show you're on.
While you're reading, two things to file away. GSCOP covers Lidl, the groceries supply code, so terms are more regulated than the discounter horror stories at trade shows would have you believe. And there's a £30 billion public commitment to British food and farming running 2025 to 2030, double the previous pledge, more than 650 British suppliers already in it. If you manufacture in Britain with capacity to grow, that isn't small talk, that's you volunteering to help a retailer hit a number it went out and announced, and I'd lead with it rather than waiting politely to be asked.
The other thing hiding in plain sight, and Lidl's own supplier guidance says this so it isn't me guessing, is that small suppliers often start by testing products through the promotional food specials range, the themed in-and-out weekly promotions, fixed volume, fixed window, then everyone goes home with no ring on anyone's finger. Nine times out of ten, maybe more often than that if I'm being honest, that's the pitch I would build first, because a product that clears the fixture during a specials week has already made the argument for its own permanent listing, and made it in their data, off their own tills, which is evidence you could not have bought at any price, or nothing half as good anyway. Well. You sort of are buying it, but you follow me.
A warning before you build the deck though. Lidl is not Aldi, and lumping them together is how amateurs introduce themselves. Aldi keeps brands on a very short lead. Lidl has been adding them on purpose where a name pulls people in, confectionery, soft drinks, health and wellness, some ambient. Aldi runs no loyalty scheme at all, none whatsoever, whereas Lidl Plus moved over to points in May 2026, a point per pound spent, with daily actives up 20 per cent on the year if I remember the figure right, and that app amounts to promotion machinery you can actually sit down and plan against. Even the bakery smell by the door is information, if you're willing to read it that way, and what I take from it, for whatever that's worth, is that this is a retailer perfectly happy to spend money on theatre wherever the theatre demonstrably grows the basket. The uncomfortable flip side, and it took me a while to start saying this bit out loud to founders, is that your SKU will be judged by that same arithmetic every single week it holds its slot, and there is no sentimentality anywhere in the building about how hard that slot was for you to win.
On the deck itself, I've written before about what Tesco wants on slide one, and a decent amount of that thinking transfers across, more than you might expect, but a discounter deck leans its whole weight on three particular slides in a way a big-four deck never quite has to. The first is cost, and I'd spend more time on this slide than feels reasonable, because you're showing what your position looks like at genuine volume, where the efficiencies actually come from as you scale, that sort of thing, and it wants to land at a cost price that still leaves Lidl room to retail below the big four on a like-for-like comparison. If your model only holds together at boutique volume, and plenty of the models people sent me did, then honestly no amount of design work is going to save the deck, you have to go away and fix the numbers first, and worry about the fonts a long way after that. The second is capacity, which I know sounds like the dull slide, and it stayed dull to me too until I understood what actually keeps a buyer up at night, which is not whether your brand is any good, they made their mind up on that before they ever agreed to the meeting, it's the picture of your factory falling over in week three with their name attached to the gap on the shelf. So you show a production plan that works at national volume, with headroom built into it, you name your co-packer, or your own line capacity if you run your own kit, and somewhere in there you prove you've genuinely thought about what a specials spike would do to all of it. The third is promotion written in their language rather than yours, what a specials week would look like, what you'd be willing to fund, how you'd use the Lidl Plus mechanics they've built.
As for what to do this week, download the supplier pack, and decide early whether you're pitching a specials trial or a permanent listing, because those are two different pitches and I've watched founders blend them and lose both. Build the cost model before you build the story. If the big four are on your list as well then the Asda guide is here, and I'd ask you, gently, not to let those two decks share so much as a slide, because dragging one deck round every retailer in Britain cost more founders their listings than any other habit I saw in the years it took LoveRaw to reach 13,000 stores across 25 countries. That habit is the reason DeckSmith exists at all, one deck per buyer, shaped for the person who is actually going to read it, and if Lidl is that buyer, you can start the deck here. Decks built that way have gone on to generate close to £16 million in retailer sales. Not because a deck is a magic bullet, it isn't, but because it is usually the first thing a buyer ever sees of a brand, and you only get the one go at that. Decks built that way have gone on to generate close to £16 million in retailer sales. Not because a deck is a magic bullet, it isn't, but because it is usually the first thing a buyer ever sees of a brand, and you only get the one go at that.
