The discounter Aldi Süd is testing fresh products such as fruit, vegetables, bread, cheese and milk for delivery online in the Ruhr area for the first time. Aldi Süd announced that customers in Mülheim an der Ruhr, Duisburg and Oberhausen could register for the delivery service immediately. A test with a “Click & Collect” model is also planned in the future, in which customers order the goods online and then pick them up in the store themselves, Aldi Süd added.
So far, the discounter had only offered non-food items from vacuum cleaners to knife blocks in its German online shop and avoided the complex and difficult business with fresh food. However, there were experiments with food deliveries at foreign subsidiaries in the USA, Great Britain and Switzerland.
According to the discounter, it is a local and time-limited test run. “Currently, a nationwide implementation is not planned,” it said. Because online food trading in Germany is “currently not a profitable business model” due to the high costs for personnel and logistics.
The Aldi-Süd concept is similar to that of the competitor Picnic. This means that the delivery should be based on the milkman principle, in which the delivery vehicles drive fixed routes within a delivery area. For customers, this restricts the free choice of delivery time, but the greater bundling of routes reduces delivery costs. According to the Aldi website, the minimum order value for deliveries is 20 euros. Up to a purchase value of 50 euros, a service fee of 4.50 euros is added. Above that, the fee is waived.