9 Big Changes Coming To Aldi In 2025

If we had to pick a few words to describe Aldi, "disruptive" would be a good one to start with. The German retailer has changed the shopping game for good with its promise of great food deals that are still seriously high in quality, and after rustling up the supermarket space across countries in Europe, it set its sights on the United States — where it's continuing to thrive. Aldi doesn't just rely on its USP of affordable everyday items in a frills-free experience, though: It's also a retailer that's keenly aware that you have to continue adapting to survive. As such, it's a supermarket chain that's constantly reassessing how it does business, and introducing new protocols to keep up with its competitors.

Few years look as big in terms of changes for Aldi as 2025. The midpoint through the 2020s is a bit of an inflection point for the retailer, in which it looks to solidify its sustainability practices in various areas and look to the future. It's also doing this while continuing to put its mark on the map, and expanding aggressively throughout the United States, with hundreds of new stores and converted locations. Plus, it's putting down an even stronger footprint in America with an expanded headquarters, which clearly demonstrates how serious it is about sticking around. It's gonna be a big year: Let's check out everything Aldi has planned.

With the amount of stores it has, Aldi knows that it has to ensure that it's doing as much as possible to reduce its impact on the environment. That's why it's spent a huge amount of time and effort on improving the sustainability of its packaging, a move which you'll largely start seeing the benefit of in 2025. Aldi has set the intention to make 100% of its own-brand packaging either recyclable, reusable, or compostable by 2025. The store has also endeavored to shrink the general size of its packaging, ensuring that less materials are used on products, and for its plastic packaging to be made up of more recycled materials.

Longer-term, Aldi aims to boost the recycled content of its packaging even further. As Aldi seeks to continue to improve its packaging's sustainability, customers in 2025 and beyond may well see their favorite items packaged in different, perhaps more minimal ways. You may well also see less plastic used around your local Aldi — and given that plastic packaging is responsible for a huge amount of waste generation, this is nothing but a good thing.

Supermarkets rise, and supermarkets fall — and you can guarantee that when they do the latter, there will be a competitor around the corner, waiting to pounce. Aldi's promising position in the supermarket wars (Aldi vs Walmart, anyone?) can be seen in its planned store openings for 2025, some of which have been other supermarkets in a previous life. In 2023, Aldi announced that it had acquired Winn-Dixie and Harveys Supermarket, and in the process gained around 400 stores across Southeastern states. In 2024, the company then announced that it would be converting some of these stores to new Aldi locations.

It's estimated that around 50 Winn-Dixie and Harvey Supermarket stores will convert to Aldis, with these stores to open throughout 2025. These stores will have the same format and experience that you'd expect in any other Aldi. The company has committed to continue operating some Winn-Dixie and Harvey Supermarkets under their original brand names and with the same products, so you don't need to worry about them completely disappearing just yet. You may just see a few more Aldis in your area.

If you were shopping at Aldi in its early days, you might have been pretty disappointed at the selection of goods it had on offer. Well, those days are over, folks. Aldi now has a product selection that rivals the biggest supermarkets out there, and in 2025 you can expect to see even more new products in-store as it seeks to make its stock even more wide-ranging.

Although it's still hard to know exactly what will be coming to Aldi later in the year, we've already had a sneak peek at some of the items arriving in early 2025. Protein bowls, sprouted grain flatbread, and organic legume rice are new arrivals in January that will help you start the year off with some wholesome options. If the bakery or the snack aisle is more your style, you might spot pretzel bites, cashew clusters, or cassava and chickpea crackers on proud display. Don't forget about those home goods, too: a luxury candle from Kirkton House looks to be a pretty exciting new find, while an accent side table from SOHL will set you back just $49.99. You'll have to be pretty lucky to find this in its infamous middle aisle, though.

Thought Aldi was done growing? Nope — it's just getting started. The German supermarket chain, complete with the German aisle that you shouldn't skip, has managed to get a pretty strong hold on the American grocery store landscape in recent years. In 2025 and beyond, it looks like it's gonna get even more prominent. Aldi has announced that it's planning on opening 800 locations in the United States by the end of 2028. It aims to achieve this by not only building brand-new stores, but also, as previously mentioned, by converting old Winn-Dixie and Harvey Supermarket stores — 50 of which will open in 2025.

These 800 store openings will be incremental, but we can already see them beginning to happen across the first few months of 2025. By the end of January, new stores in New Jersey, Ohio, and Wisconsin will be open and operational. Looking ahead in the year, we'll see new stores in places like Florida, Missouri, Mississippi, and Pennsylvania open their doors to new customers. As Aldi only announces its new store openings when they're looking pretty imminent, we may have to wait a little while to see exactly where it lays its roots in the next 12 months. We can pretty much guarantee that its name will be everywhere, though.

As a major supermarket, Aldi operates with a large number of suppliers to source its food and ensure that its stores are well-stocked. One of its big aims in 2025 and beyond is to continue to investigate how best it works with its suppliers, and to be more flexible when it comes to what kinds of agreements it has with them. This flexibility stems from Aldi's wide scale store opening plans, for which it recognizes it needs to do things a little differently. The store is committed to continuing to establish long-term relationships with suppliers, which the suppliers themselves are amenable to.

In return for this combination of flexibility and long-term establishment, though, Aldi is asking some things in return. The company wants to press its suppliers to ensure that their availability and the quality of their products, as well as their willingness to supply new products, gets stronger. In the immediate short-term, this may not result in you seeing any meaningful change as the customer. Longer-term, though, these stronger relationships will likely result in a wider range of products available and more stock in your stores, instead of things being sold out or in low supply.

Aldi's presence in the United States isn't just a passing interest. The supermarket chain is here to stay — and if you need any more evidence of that, just look at what it's doing to its US headquarters in 2025. Towards the end of 2024, design-build firm A M King announced that it was overseeing a massive expansion and renovation of Aldi's Illinois-based corporate headquarters. The work would see the headquarters' square footage increase to approximately 250,000 square feet, with the construction of a fourth building to complement its three existing ones.

Those three existing ones are gonna get a serious makeover, too. New meeting rooms, better lighting, and updated HVAC systems will make the working experience more comfortable and modern. The new building, meanwhile, is set to include a fitness center and a green roof pollinator garden. The work on the headquarters is a clear signal from Aldi that it's here to stay, and will doubtless allow it to house even more employees — which will then naturally lead to more expansion across the country.

Although brick and mortar supermarkets aren't going anywhere, we all know that online shopping is here to stay too, and will likely only continue to grow throughout 2025 and beyond. Aldi will therefore be looking more keenly at how it caters to online orders through third-party apps like Instacart, and it looks to be making some improvements pretty soon. In 2024 Aldi announced that it was launching pick-to-light functionality in its stores. This functionality allows order pickers who work for Instacart to simply tap the item they're looking for in its app, which then causes a tag to light up in-store to make it easier to find.

The result of this will be that Instacart orders are fulfilled more quickly and with greater accuracy (and we love the sound of that). Aldi originally rolled the technology out in over 100 stores in Ohio and Illinois, and it was such a booming success that they're now implementing it in its stores across the country. If you're a regular in-store shopper at Aldi though, don't worry: This likely won't impact your experience at all. Now Aldi just needs to sort out its own website, and stop making changes that people aren't happy with. 

Aldi is a multinational supermarket chain with a wide matrix of operations, so it's likely no surprise that it emits a lot of energy, and a lot of potential pollutants into the atmosphere. It's also very aware that it has to tackle these emissions sooner rather than later — and 2025 looks to be a big year for it to do so. The Aldi South Group has announced that it's aiming to reduce site operational emissions by over 25% by the end of 2025, when compared to its emissions for 2016. To help it achieve this, the store encouraged its suppliers to also put emissions targets in place by the end of 2024.

It will likely seek to achieve these reductions pretty much anywhere it can, but a few key areas it will be looking at are emissions from transportation, purchased products, and electricity. The company is looking to shift to electric vehicles and alternative fuel sources wherever possible, and to improve the energy efficiency in its stores and offices. Plus, it's looking to tackle its refrigerant technology in its stores, and shift to the use of natural refrigerants by 2035 across all its locations. Aldi's ultimate goal is to become a net-zero emissions company by 2050, with other goals along the way in 2030 and 2035 to ensure that it hits those targets.

Aldi is undertaking a big push for sustainability in 2025, to cap off the work that it's already done — and as well as improving the sustainability of its packaging and its operations, it's also looking to improve its products. By the end of 2025, Aldi expects to see a large number of its products improve in their sustainability thanks to its commitment to banning those linked to deforestation. Its palm oil, beef (including its Aldi steaks), cocoa, coffee, and woof fiber-based products are all expected to become more sustainable, as part of Aldi's push to become the most sustainable supermarket in the United States.

This builds on some notable strides that it's recently made in the sustainability of its products. Aldi previously committed to ensure that all of the cotton used in its items is sustainably certified by 2025. It's also seeking to improve the sustainability of its fish and seafood products, and by 2030 it hopes to eliminate overfishing and source all of its marine food products in a responsible manner.