How quickly things change. Just last year, Sainsbury’s boasted of its biggest-ever improvement in value perception after extending its Aldi Price Match scheme to over 650 products.
Tesco has repeatedly hailed its “powerful combination of Aldi Price Match, Low Everyday Prices and Clubcard Prices” - and even Asda claimed its price match scheme was helping limit discounter market share growth last May, despite the supermarket losing share itself.
Now, though, the schemes appear to be unravelling: Asda axed its initiative entirely in January to focus on its new Rollback price campaign, while both Tesco and Sainsbury’s have culled theirs by 150 and 115 products respectively since November.
All in, it means there are more than 650 fewer claimed Aldi price matches in the mults than there were last year
Making life difficult for Aldi
The various price match schemes have often been credited with helping Tesco and Sainsbury’s grow market share and keep the discounter at bay, with the supermarkets themselves claiming Aldi’s growth was impacted by the pricing campaigns.
If price matches were truly making growth more difficult for Aldi, it stands to reason this will make it easier, and Kantar data doesn’t seem to refute the idea. After being down or at best flat year on year for much of 2024, Aldi’s market share was climbing again by December into January 2025.
Perhaps Aldi only had to be patient, since the schemes were clearly not sustainable at the size to which they had grown.
Tesco says its scheme has shrunk because it now checks Aldi prices in a minimum 10 of the discounter’s stores, instead of five. It might explain why 64 brands have gone, such as Blue Dragon, Douwe Egberts and Old El Paso, which were limited-time Specialbuys in Aldi and therefore not necessarily available across its estate at one time.
But there are other products gone from the campaign that this does not explain, notably 55 lines under Tesco’s value own label brands Hearty Food Co, Growers Harvest, Ms Molly’s and Eastman’s. These would have been matched against Aldi own label lines available widely across its estate, so it shouldn’t have been a challenge for Tesco to find them in 10 stores.
More likely, the reduction is at least in part a reaction to a September BBC Panorama investigation that called out ‘price matched’ Tesco products containing less of the main ingredient than Aldi’s, such as its Hearty Food Co chicken nuggets.
The Panorama price match problem
Indeed, the five Tesco products identified in the programme as having the biggest discrepancy in the proportion of main ingredient – chicken nuggets, chicken kievs, chilli con carne, cottage pies and apple & blackcurrant squash – have all been removed from the price match campaign since November, according to Paul Stainton, partner at private label consultancy IPLC.
“Tesco were shown to be price-matching their value tier against Aldi’s standard tier own label,” he says. “It’s not a surprise that Tesco subtly removed many of these items from the price match to avoid further negative reaction.”
But there was nothing particularly revelatory in Panorama’s findings to anyone who had looked at price matching schemes in detail – Panorama simply brought the issue to wider attention.
Back in 2021, not long after Sainsbury’s launched its scheme, The Grocer highlighted discrepancies including its chicken & vegetable curry containing only 15% chicken compared with the 35% in Aldi’s, and Sainsbury’s Hubbard’s smooth peanut butter with 89% peanuts versus the 94% in Aldi’s.
Sainsbury’s has offered little explanation for shrinking its scheme, beyond saying the numbers can go up and down just like prices, while Stainton has pointed to likely pressure on margins.
“We know all too well that many of our competitors are playing fast and loose with their matching schemes,” raged Aldi UK CEO Giles Hurley in September last year. “Inflated SKU counts, continuously rotating products, lower specifications… the list goes on.”
Hurley can celebrate that we seem have to have passed peak ‘Aldi price match’ as the schemes shrink to more realistic levels.
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