California Welcomes ALDI! (Updated with giveaway winner!)

Congrats Jenny! I’ll be contacting you to get your information for the gift card!

What I remember of ALDI when I was a kid was bagging our own groceries – I thought that was the coolest thing ever…

Psst…I still think it’s pretty cool 😉

I was invited *(along with some other local bloggers – so happy to see some of my inland empire blog friends!!) to get a sneak preview of the newest members of the ALDI family – several new locations have just opened in Southern California, with a lot more to come! 45 by the end of the year, with 25 by July alone!

The first thing I noticed was how bright, clean and cozy the store was – and for good reason – while many grocery stores have thousands of items (and choices!!!), ALDI has about 1,200 – which I love -rather than carrying 20 versions of everything (ugh – HOW many kinds of pasta or cereal can there be????), ALDI offers only the best of customers’ weekly must-haves like fresh produce and organics, dairy, gluten-free foods, USDA Choice beef and bakery items, while saving up to 50 percent! ALDI also carries about 90% exclusive or store brands, which carry a DOUBLE guarantee – from all the samples we got to try, the quality is just as good as the name brand items, and in a couple cases even better!

Now we come to one of my favorite aisles – fresh produce – what I love here is that they locally source where they can and you won’t find South American peaches in December or Winter squash in July. Their prices for organic were as good if not better than the prices for ordinary produce at my usual store.

The prices for most items were lower overall and there really wasn’t anything I was missing that I normally buy. I didn’t miss the name brand items, I definitely didn’t miss having someone bag my groceries (bring your own bags and a (refunded) quarter for the cart!) – now I can have all my frozen items in one bag, cold in another, and staples in another (can you tell I think about this WAY too much?? lol)

We were invited to do a little shopping while we were there and I grabbed all of this:

…for $23! I was AMAZED! You can’t even find key limes in a lot of stores! The fruit pouches were super yummy (more about those soon in my “what’s in my car” post), I was impressed by the large number of gluten free items, and my son and I fought over the chicken salad singles – they were THAT tasty!

I was excited to see they had such a great social media presence – not only do they have a BLOG with great recipes, you can also connect with them on TWITTER, INSTAGRAM, PINTEREST and FACEBOOK – they are super responsive and I feel like they really listen to their customers – most of the items they choose to put on the shelves each year are suggested by customers!

During my visit I was gifted a $25 gift card to give away here to one of my awesome readers – to win simply tell me your favorite ALDI item or a challenge you’d like to see me do with JUST ALDI exclusive items! One lucky name will be drawn at random – of course I’d love if you subscribed or followed me too but it’s not a requirement to winning!!! Good Luck!

*I was invited to this event and compensated for my time – however the groceries were purchased personally by me and my opinions about my experience and excitement for geeking out about groceries are strictly my own.