Aldi has long held back on the subject of food delivery services, but now the discount pioneer is venturing out of cover. Aldi Süd is now serving customers with its own delivery service – albeit initially with a very limited delivery area. To begin with, Aldi Süd is concentrating on the immediate area around the company’s headquarters in Mülheim an der Ruhr. The neighboring cities of Duisburg and Oberhausen are also supplied.
Interested customers can register online for the MeinAldi service and have products delivered “from A for apple to Z for toothpaste”, as the website says. The prices should be the same as in the store. The minimum order value is 20 euros and a delivery fee of 4.50 euros will be charged. This does not apply to purchases of 50 euros or more. Deliveries are made within a certain delivery window on the day after the order is placed.
Officially, Aldi’s new grocery delivery service is only running as a limited test. At the current time, a nationwide implementation is not planned, explains the discounter. Due to the high costs, Aldi currently does not see a profitable business model for the delivery of groceries. Nevertheless, the step is a signal for the future of e-commerce with food, because Aldi has only sold non-food items in the online shop so far.
In terms of logistics, Aldi is based on its competitor Picnic. The Dutch food delivery service, in whose German business Edeka is involved, follows fixed routes for delivery according to the so-called milkman principle. This reduces the effort, but also means that deliveries are not made on the same day. However, Picnic is also making losses.
In the past few years, new providers had fought a ruinous competition for food deliveries, sometimes within a few minutes. The service was usually limited to metropolitan areas and was extremely costly. The delivery service Getir, which took over Berlin competitor Gorillas at the end of 2022, announced a massive austerity program just a few days ago. Getir is cutting thousands of jobs and is withdrawing from 17 of 23 German cities.
Sources: Aldi / DPA / Handelsblatt / Lebensmittelzeitung
