Aldi is finally putting its name on its products. The grocer, which runs nearly 3,200 stores in the U.S., tells Fast Company that it’s launching its first-ever namesake brand and putting its name on the front of its private-label product packaging for the first time.
It’s no small task: More than 90% of Aldi’s products are private label.
Generic brands have found new life as customers have traded down from national brands to cheaper private labels to beat inflation. In 2024, retailers sold a record $270 billion worth of private-label products in the U.S., according to the Private Label Manufacturers Association. For Aldi, though, private-label brands don’t just represent a growing slice of the pie, they’re the whole pie.
“Private label is the core of what we do,” says Scott Patton, Aldi’s chief commercial officer. “I’m not going to say we invented it; I would say we’ve perfected it.”
While the grocer has seen a 7.1% year-over-year increase in store traffic this year, it also has a problem: Too many customers who bought Aldi private brands didn’t know those brands were exclusive to the chain.
“The overall sentiment was, on average, customers didn’t know that was an Aldi brand,” says Kristy Reitz, the grocer’s director of brand and design. “Now if they shop us a little less frequently, they think they can find that brand elsewhere, and in fact it’s a private-label brand to Aldi.”
Aldi turned to multiple creative partners to handle the job, including Favorite Child, Pearlfisher, Contrast, Equator, and Sun Strategy. The goal was to make the packaging recognizable, but it also needed to be flexible.
“If every package shows up in this very tight design system and in the exact same way, it would look kind of boring,” Reitz says. “It would be harder to shop.”
The company’s new portfolio of private-label packaging includes “an ALDI original” endorsement that will appear on the front for brands like Simply Nature and Specially Selected, while some brands will be replaced with the Aldi name, the company says.
Aldi’s competitors have already responded to the rise of private labeling by upgrading their generic packaging, like Target’s Up&Up and CVS’s Well Market. Walmart launched Bettergoods, an altogether new private-label brand, to expand its retail reach.
Aldi says its packaging overhaul wasn’t done as a response to that trend, or in response to litigation, like the suit filed by Mondelez International in May, which accused the grocery chain of ripping off its packaging for legacy brands like Oreo and Chips Ahoy.
“This has actually been a project we’ve been working on for a couple of years,” Reitz says.
But it does represent a concerning development for the company’s competitors. By finally putting its name on its own product packaging, Aldi is making the most of its advantage as a private-label grocer at a moment when customers are more interested than ever in shopping generic.
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