Aldi’s "UnWrapped" report highlights 2024 shopping favorites, including top-selling products and emerging trends. The Packer reached out to Bill Duesenberg, Aldi’s director of national buying for produce, to learn how these insights align with purchasing patterns.
The report highlights how Aldi delivered for its nearly 50 million total shoppers over the past year, while simultaneously:
- Opening over 120 new stores nationally.
- Attracting nearly 20 million new shoppers.
- Introducing over 2,000 new Aldi Finds.
- Selling more than 43 million pounds of bananas, 9.4 million pounds of greens and 11 million pasta sauces.
Duesenberg: We’ve seen the healthy eating trend continue to grow in popularity this year with organic produce sales increasing more than 20% year over year. Specifically with Aldi shoppers, bananas and greens were the big winners. We sold more than 43 million pounds of bananas and 9.4 million greens (like our Simply Nature Organic Spring Mix) nationwide. Those numbers aren’t surprising, though. Quality, affordable produce, including the wide selection of fresh fruits and veggies stocked daily, is what Aldi is known for.
The majority of the top 10 Specially Selected private-label products sold this year were bread varieties except for cara cara oranges ranking fifth and french green beans ranking sixth, totaling nearly 8 million purchases each. Aldi was the first grocer to make private-label products its primary offering almost 60 years ago. Now, our exclusive brands make up more than 90% of our produce selection.
There’s also been double-digit growth in our premium grape offerings, which include Cotton Candy grapes, Autumncrisp grapes and the Specially Selected Perfect Pairing red and green seedless grapes. These numbers are proof of the rising popularity of private-label products and have shown us the value of investing in growing the produce department to keep up with consumer demand.
Sustainability remains a top priority in the produce industry right now, especially at Aldi. We put in a lot of work this year to reduce the use of unnecessary packaging wherever possible by implementing the following:
- Reduce the use of unnecessary packaging wherever possible and use recyclable material.
- Introducing top-seal punnet packaging for our tomatoes, blueberries, salads and grapes, which cuts down plastic use by 20%.
- Removing packaging from roma tomatoes, helping us reduce over 200,000 pounds of packaging annually.
- In 2025, we’ll remove over 150 U.S. tons of plastic across the entire citrus plastic reduction program. This includes new packaging for mandarin oranges where the width of the plastic band is reduced.