Aldi’s a different gravy
MANY years ago, before I became a sort of journalist, I was offered a job managing a supermarket. I must say I was tempted. I am, after all, a shopkeeper’s son. Retail is in my blood. “Also,” I said to myself, “you enjoy meeting members of the public, don’t you, Mike?” (As I say, this was some while back, long before my answer to that question became: “You’ve got to be kidding.”)
But in the end I turned the offer down. Having weighed up my options, I decided I wanted to be KateAdie.Which was brave of me, I’d like to think, because this was in an age when I couldn’t just say: “I AM Kate Adie,” and have you arrested if you dared so much as to query this.
Even so, I remain fascinated by supermarkets to this day. I’m even mad about supermarket-themed TV shows. So imagine my excitement when I heard about the new one starting tonight on Channel 4.
ALDI’S NEXT BIGTHING
(8pm) is a competition in which food and drink producers pitch their most exciting ideas to the country’s fourth largest supermarket. Up for grabs each week is one humongous contract, to supply their product to Aldi stores across Britain. See, I told you it was exciting.
The person they’ll need to wow is chief buyer JulieAshfield.And joining her will be hosts Anita Rani and Chris Bavin.
Chris is a particularly appropriate choice, being not just an award-winning grocer but also the cohost of BBC One’s EatWell For Less?
That’s the show, remember, where each week he visits a different family and explains to them that non-branded foods cost way less than their branded equivalents and if they’d bothered to watch even one of the previous zillion episodes they’d have figured this out and saved him the journey.
Non-branded foods – ie. ownlabel items, not household-name products – are of course a big thing at Aldi.
It’s one of the reasons why shopping there is such fun, as you get to admire the ingenious ways they’ve made their own labels and product names look uncannily familiar. (Me, I can never resist a bag of their pickled onion Monster Claws, ideally sprinkled with their Quixo gravy granules).
We kick off with the dinnertime category. Six sets of producers each pitch a specialist range – namely, pies, pasta sauces, Chinese cooking sauces, Indian ready meals, dishes for kids and, most radical, a range of meal kits made from crickets. Cricket mince, cricket burgers, cricket stir-fry etc.
Will Julie decide the crickets deserve the deal?
If not, might she live to regret it? You know, a bit like that guy who famously turned down the beetles?