Canned Foods At Aldi You Should Avoid At All Costs

In December 2022, it was announced that Aldi was the fastest-growing grocery store brand in the United States. This was the third consecutive year Aldi had earned this title. Such consistent growth is due to Aldi's core appeal, great value for money; the brand offers extremely low prices thanks to its extensive array of private labels and stripped-back stores.

Canned foods are a favorite of many shoppers due to their long shelf life and low cost. Aldi, being aware of this, has an extensive list of canned foods for sale, ranging from individual ingredients to whole meals. Of course, canned goods also form a vital part of disaster preparation; many Americans have basements full of canned products for emergencies.

Outside of emergency use, consumers evaluate canned foods using the same criteria as any food product: quality, price, and nutrition. As with any facet of any store, some canned products are deemed better than others. What follows are eight products we believe you would be better off bypassing on your next shop.

If you have purchased some of these items and found them wanting do not despair. Aldi's Twice as Nice Guarantee ensures shoppers can return items they are unhappy with and receive a replacement product and a full refund.

Aldi has made good progress when it comes to the sustainability of its seafood. This is down to the company developing and implementing a solid seafood buying policy. Included in the policy are specific commitments pertaining to sustainable tuna. These include sourcing from well managed fisheries. The brand also states its commitment to only buying legally harvested tuna and favoring fishing methods that have less impact on the environment, such as pole and line.

While these commitments and principles are adhered to there remains one Aldi seafood product that is significantly less sustainable than the others, Northern Catch's canned albacore tuna. This product is sold under the name "solid white tuna."

Albacore is a species that features on Greenpeace's red list, a group of species that the charity believes should not currently be commercially available. In albacore's case, population decline, poor fishery management, and impacts on the ocean's ecosystems are the reasons for the fish featuring on the red list. Each of these is exacerbated by increased consumer demand.

Fortunately, Aldi shoppers don't need to steer clear of all canned seafood. As previously mentioned, the grocery brand has drastically improved the sustainability of its seafood in recent years. As such, consumers should consider replacing the white tuna with alternatives like Aldi's Northern Catch sustainably caught pole and line chunk light tuna. This product is made from skipjack tuna, is MSC certified, and uses sustainable fishing methods. All of which make it a sustainable choice.

Aldi's range of canned products includes a number of ready meals. These are sold under several private-label brands including Bon Italia. This particular brand specializes in canned pasta meals and one of its products is beef ravioli in a tomato and meat sauce.

This product, like Bon Italia's other offerings, provides customers with a cheap, quick, and simple meal. Unfortunately, this convenience comes at a cost; the beef ravioli contains significant amounts of saturated fat and salt. A single 15-ounce can of Bon Italia beef ravioli contains over half an adult's recommended daily intake of salt and over a quarter of the recommended daily intake of saturated fat. What's more, the product is highly processed and includes artificial ingredients such as caramel coloring. All of these features indicate that Bon Italia's canned beef ravioli is not a healthy choice.

Customers who are seeking healthier options should consider switching to Aldi's canned pasta products for dishes that are cooked at home. The store stocks a vast array of pasta types, including varieties made from beans, meaning every shopper has access to healthier options when it comes to pasta.

Brookdale is another private, canned goods label that is owned by Aldi. One of the Brookdale products sold in Aldi is canned Vienna sausage which is made from a mixture of chicken, beef, and pork. As with many other products on this list, the nutritional aspect of this product is its shortcoming. One 4.6-ounce can contains 25% of an adult's daily recommended saturated fat intake, 30% of the recommended cholesterol intake, and 48% of the recommended sodium intake.

Eating these sausages is not an enjoyable experience. They have an overly soft texture and are incredibly salty. The unpleasant texture may arise due to mechanically separated chicken being used to make the Vienna sausages. According to USDA, mechanically separated meat is the scraps of a carcass that has been forced through a sieve at high pressure. The resulting meat takes on a paste-like consistency which consumers of this product will recall.

Again, convenience and cost are the two main attractions of Brookdale's Vienna sausage. That being said, Aldi has a fantastic range of fresh and smoked sausages, including Polish kielbasa which is also cheap and ready to eat. With such a solid range of fresh and smoked sausages, we believe Brookdale's Vienna sausage should be bypassed for healthier, better-tasting options.

A lot of people shop at Aldi because of its cheap prices. As previously mentioned, canned goods are often amongst the least expensive products in the entire store. This, however, does not mean that buying canned products is always the cheapest way to shop.

Take potatoes, for example. Aldi sells canned whole potatoes through the Happy Harvest brand. Although prices vary from store to store, one 15-ounce can usually costs around 80 cents, meaning one pound of canned potatoes is equivalent to approximately 85 cents.

For comparison, a pound of fresh potatoes costs 65.7 cents from Walmart. Some shoppers in California have reported buying ten pounds of Aldi's fresh potatoes for as little as $3.79. This would suggest that, with a little shopping around, fresh potatoes are significantly cheaper than canned ones.

Finally, Happy Harvest whole potatoes are not a super convenient food product. As they are only partially cooked, Happy Harvest whole potatoes must undergo a cooking process at home, just like any other potato. Admittedly, cooking times will be reduced but this negligible difference in convenience, when compared to the discrepancy in cost, makes us favor fresh potatoes over Happy Harvest's canned product.

The first item on our list that doesn't come from one of Aldi's private brands is Campbell's chunky clam chowder. As it is not a private label, Campbell's soups are known for being relatively expensive options in Aldi. One customer found that Campbell's soups cost a dollar more per can than Aldi's own Chef's Cupboard brand.

When it comes to clam chowder, this extra cost does not translate into a superior product. Instead, Campbell's chowder is bland and disappointing as one customer highlighted on Amazon: "It's thick and has a very good amount of potatoes, just how I like it. But it's SO BLAND. I had to add salt and pepper to it, and it didn't help much. It doesn't taste like much of anything, and there is very little pieces of clam in there. It wasn't completely disappointing because the clams that WERE in the soup tasted good."

It is shocking that the soup is so bland given its high sodium content; one can of Campbell's chunky clam chowder contains over half of an adult's daily recommended salt intake. Another reason to avoid Campbell's chunky clam chowder in favor of better, cheaper alternatives.

Peas are a convenient staple that can be added to many meals. Although they are occasionally available fresh, most customers face two options when buying peas: frozen or canned. Aldi stocks both.

Frozen peas are far superior to their canned counterparts. As Livestrong reports, frozen peas contain twice the amount of vitamin C, three times as much vitamin A, and nearly half as much sodium when compared to canned peas.

From a culinary perspective, many chefs prefer frozen peas to fresh ones as Mike Davis, executive chef of Terra, explained to Food & Wine: "Often in fresh spring peas, the sugar turns to starch so quickly, compromising the flavor and texture of the peas. Frozen peas are flash frozen right after picking and often have a better texture."

To cap it all off, Aldi's frozen peas are usually much cheaper than the canned peas. In the brand's British stores, canned peas cost more than double frozen peas. Consequently, it's difficult to justify buying Happy Harvest medium sweet peas when cheaper, healthier alternatives can easily be found in-store.

Another Brookdale product that features on our list is sloppy Joe sauce, a 15-ounce canned sauce that only requires the addition of ground meat to make the popular sandwich filling. This product is very similar to the well-known product sold by Manwich.

While many of Aldi's private label products fare well when compared to name brands, Brookdale's sloppy Joe sauce is one instance where the grocery store falls short. A review posted to Reddit highlights this: "It's not horrible, but it just seems to be missing something that Manwich has. Flavor is a little meh."

Brookdale's product is also unhealthier than Manwich's product. It contains 70 milligrams more sodium and one more gram of sugar per 64-gram serving than Manwich's original sloppy Joe sauce. The area where Brookdale surpasses Manwich is in price, with the former being much cheaper. Despite this, we advise going for Manwich sloppy Joe sauce as opposed to Brookdale's inferior product.

The final product on our list is Dakota's Pride maple baked beans. As the name suggests, these baked beans are seasoned with maple syrup. Cured bacon is also used to flavor the product.

One half-cup serving of Dakota's Pride maple baked beans contains nearly a quarter of an adult's daily recommended allowance of added sugars and over a quarter of the daily recommended allowance of sodium. As such, this is not the healthiest baked bean product available to consumers.

This poor nutritional profile is not the most alarming aspect of the product. Instead, it is the product's tendency to spoil as one reviewer highlighted via Fooducate: "I've also had issues with the Dakota's Pride beans being spoiled in the can. At first I thought it was a bad batch, second time I thought I had a dented can, third time I just took them back, fourth and fifth time I beat myself up for buying them because obviously they just make bad beans. Now I make special trips to other stores to get a brand ALDI doesn't carry."