Discount supermarket Aldi has announced ambitious plans to potentially quadruple stores across the UK.
Currently with 700 stores across Britain, Aldi is hoping to open 1,000 by 2022 and rival Tesco (LON:TSCO) who currently have 2,700 outlets.
Recent reports show that £1 of every £14 spent on groceries in the UK goes into Aldi’s tills, while a quarter of UK grocery money goes to Tesco.
“If you look at the population, we think not only could we have a store in every town and city, but for every 25,000 to 30,000 people,” said Matthew Barnes, the UK and Ireland chief executive of the store.
“We have 700 stores now and 300 sites already approved on our books. And there are 600 town locations where we don’t have a store; in many of which we could easily have two, three or four stores … We don’t have a store in Watford, [but] that would be a six to eight Aldi town.” he continued.
Aldi has soared in popularity among British shoppers since the last recession. It overtook Waitrose in 2015 and in February also overtook the Co-operative to become the fifth biggest grocer.
Since the growing competition, Aldi has found no choice but to start eating into its profits to continue providing cheap prices for customers. The supermarket has reported a second consectutive year of falling profits.
Matthew Barnes has said they will continue cutting prices to keep them below Asda, Sainsbury’s, Tesco’s and other rival supermarkets, even “if losses are an inevitable consequence”.
The chain’s operating profit dropped by 1.8 percent to £255.6 million in 2015 on sales of £7.7 billion.
Head of retail and consumer insight at Kantar Worldpanel says there is plenty of room for the expansion of Aldi because “a lot of people still can’t shop in an Aldi as their local store”.