ALDI turns focus to value, convenience and health. What does it mean for the competition?
As ALDI ups its game, it’s appealing to Millennial shoppers and other retailers can learn a lot from the grocery chain’s evolution.
IRI has introduced the second in a series of IRI Market Shift Studies, providing retailers and manufacturers with the understanding and data to respond efficiently and intelligently to new market dynamics.
The newest study analyzes the expansion impact of ALDI, a deep-discount leader in grocery retailing that has plans to add more than 900 stores in the U.S. for a total of 2,500 stores by 2022, and what it means for retailers’ local markets.
ALDI’s focus on value and convenience, as well as its increasing emphasis on organic and healthier products, has enabled it to capture more share of wallet from Millennial shoppers than any other shopper segment, making its entrance into new markets particularly formidable. In fact, new stores are motivating new shoppers to try ALDI — 40% of first-time shoppers cited they wanted to experience a new store.
Once a shopper buys at ALDI, customer satisfaction and repeat buying rates are high, with 80% of shoppers saying they are extremely or very satisfied with their experience and 84% claiming they will definitely shop at ALDI again.
With ALDI point-of-sale (POS) data unavailable to the marketplace, retailers and manufacturers must rely on shopper-based tools and analyses to understand, measure and track performance and impact. IRI’s Market Shift Study contains unique insights from custom shopper surveys, store-level impact analyses and market-level pricing comparisons to understand the initial and ongoing impacts of ALDI’s presence. The analytics package, which will be updated quarterly, aims to arm CPG companies with insights to help them better understand the grocer’s impact and identify new opportunities.
“In this latest Market Shift Study, IRI is offering insights into the stores, markets and categories that are most likely to be impacted by ALDI’s footprint expansion,” said Fernando Salido, executive vice president of Shopper Analytics, Consumer & Shopper Marketing for IRI. “With this in-depth analysis on ALDI and its plans to become the third-largest grocery store by count in the United States, retailers and manufacturers have the opportunity to effectively meet new challenges with a better understanding of where the greatest risks are and how shoppers are thinking about their new choices.”
The IRI Market Shift Study series includes reports addressing key questions in the retail marketplace today, including:
How to compete with new retailers in the U.S. market;
How to compete with retailers that are rapidly expanding into new markets;
How to understand and adapt to the changes that are occurring in the marketplace due to Amazon’s acquisition of Whole Foods; and
How to measure market share when more than 50% of food dollars are spent on purchases outside traditional CPG outlets.
The insights are available now in three different packages to meet the varying needs of different retailers and manufacturers.
