Aldi Reviewer Turns Ten, Part 2: A Year-By-Year Retrospective

This is the second part in a three-part series celebrating our site’s 10th anniversary.

We can’t think about the history of our site without thinking about how it fits into the larger online timeline.

The internet is 57 years old, dating back to U.S. military operations in 1969. Websites — or what used to be called the World Wide Web — are around 40 years old, with the early ones opening in the mid-1980s. Web 2.0, the name given to interactive blogs and social media, is about 20 years old, with those sites coming into the picture during the mid-2000s.

In other words, Aldi Reviewer has been around for half of the Web 2.0 movement. That’s a long time, certainly longer than we would have ever expected when we first piloted this site in 2016.

A lot has happened during that time. As part of our celebration of our site’s decade of life, we decided to revisit the highlights from each year of our journey.

2016: Setting Sail

Aldi Reviewer formally launched on July 3, 2016, with a launch post and an early crop of reviews and features. After our early weeks, we settled into a pattern of a couple of posts a week while we continued to work on other projects and keep up with life. One of our early limited buy reviews, the Sempre Digital Weather Station, garnered more than 120 comments. We wrapped up the year with our first look into Aldi holiday hours.

2017: Introducing New Features

We brought a lot of new ideas to the blog in 2017. In April, we started taking guest posts for the first time. In May, we published our first eBook, An Unofficial Guide to Shopping at Aldi, which was available on Amazon from 2017-2019 before being replaced by a second edition. We also published bonus features to the book on our website. That same month, after getting way too many comments and emails thinking we were Aldi, we published a compilation of those comments and emails, with names left out but typos left in. (We’ve since published 13 more.) And in June, we published our first installment of This Week at Aldi, which has been a mainstay of our site ever since.

On the social media front, we launched our Pinterest page in July and our YouTube channel in November.

2018: Building Consistency and Expanding Horizons

For us, 2018 marked growing a lot of the things we’d been cultivating our first two years as a blog, including maintaining a daily posting schedule and continuing to build out our lineup of posts, including product reviews, features, and This Week at Aldi. In addition, we started tiptoeing into the world of Aldi’s distant cousin, Trader Joe’s. We’ve continued to write about TJ’s ever since, with our current schedule releasing TJ’s posts on Saturdays.

Behind the scenes, we also made some changes to our advertising platform, which enabled us to expand our review content. The 2018 winter holidays were among the most interesting to date, with Aldi rolling out Instacart nationwide and customers scrambling madly for for Aldi US’s first wine Advent calendar — a sign of things to come. To us, it was clear that the cult of Aldi was on the rise.

2019: Cultivating Collaborations and Plugging Holes

One of our personal privileges in 2019 was to collaborate with other creators. We interviewed an Aldi pasta artist in April, chatted with a fabulous wine blogger in June, and hosted an Aldi bloggers roundtable in August. We also revisited our 2017 eBook: in May, we published a revised and updated edition of our book An Unofficial Guide to Shopping at Aldi alongside a new round of website-based bonus features. And in December, we unveiled our first annual awards post, the AR Awards.

We continued to grapple with keeping up with everything Aldi was selling. To alleviate that, we added open threads to our site in mid-2019, which let us establish a presence for products we were, for one reason or another, unable to review. Those open threads ended up being some of the most lively spaces on our blog, with commenters talking about products. That was especially true with viral products like Aldi’s accent cabinet. As winter approached, we showed up to see Aldi retool its Advent calendar sales process.

Under the hood, we were able to implement some technical upgrades to our site, which helped us handle our growing traffic.

2020: Aldi and the Pandemic

2020 certainly began innocently enough, with our staff discussing our Aldi wish list for the year and grappling over the growing Aldi superfan craze.

By late February, though, the world was buzzing with a very different kind of talk.  We first touched on the subject of COVID-19 in late February, tracking the potential impact the virus might have on Aldi and Trader Joe’s. By March, the pandemic had come to dominate world news. We covered it extensively, from chronicling the initial grocery rush to reporting on updated company policies. In late March, we assembled another bloggers roundtable to talk about the state of the Aldi world with respect to COVID.

The pandemic would shape much of the Aldiverse for the rest of the year, including the demand for, and availability of, various Aldi Finds. While we continued to write on a regular schedule, the shadow of a different world definitely impacted our coverage.

The pandemic didn’t stop customers from showing up for big events. For the third straight holiday season, Advent calendars proved a big hit, enough that in 2020 Aldi dubbed the day National Advent Calendar Day.

2021: Post-Pandemic Hurdles

If our writing in 2020 was shaped by the pandemic, our writing in 2021 was shaped by the gradual transition to a post-pandemic world. We saw it in our coverage of 2021 Aldi Find shortages and subsequent stealth releases of delayed Aldi Finds. The entire 2020-2021 period was a strange time for the middle aisle, and it came through in our coverage of it. By the end of the year, another post-pandemic problem, inflation, would show up on our radar.

Demand for information about Aldi remained high, though, starting with the treadmill and continuing straight through the holiday season, with Aldi’s growing Advent calendar lineup proving a big hit. Meanwhile, Aldi started pilot testing self-checkout, for better or worse.

2022: The Cult and the Economy

Just like in 2020 and 2021, much of our work was shaped by larger global events. Early in the year, we followed the shortages of staple items that were plaguing all grocers, along with the ongoing specter of inflation. What’s more, as people started to travel more, demand for Aldi Finds fell, creating backlogs in stores.

Meanwhile, the cult of Aldi, which we’d been watching with interest for years, leveled up in 2022, with Aldi selling its own branded clothing and giving away an Aldi-themed wedding. We may even have spotted Aldi products in a movie or two. If we had any doubts about Aldi fandom, they were dispelled in 2022.

2023: Store Changes Afoot

In March of 2023, self-checkout finally landed in our neck of the woods. We can’t say we were big fans, but we also had to accept that the train had left the station. Our local stores got a dramatic makeover that year, which we had opinions about. As it turned out, we weren’t the only ones.

2023 was also a year that we tracked the grocer’s explosive growth. Aldi was then at the end of a of a multi-year, multi-billion dollar plan to add new stores and update existing stores. With the grocer having added some 1,000 stores over the previous decade, we suspected growth was still on the menu. Even we, though, couldn’t have predicted the earthquake that reverberated through the grocery industry when Aldi purchased Southeastern Grocers, owners of Winn-Dixie and Harveys Supermarket. After talking with a grocery industry insider, we ruminated on the burning questions we had about the acquisition.

2024: Hitting the Road and Changes at Home

For most of our blog’s existence, our work was largely confined to our local Aldi stores. That changed in 2024. In June, we took a trip to Walt Disney World Resort in Orlando, Florida. As part of the trip, we were able put a few Aldi Finds to work, including several of the Disney variety. We also were able to test out how Instacart could help a Disney World traveler to get groceries.

A month later, in July, we were able to visit Aldi’s checkout-free pilot store in suburban Chicago. The checkout-free experience wasn’t perfect, but it was fascinating to see the Aldigo technology in action.

Our year was also colored by the passing of our longtime Aldi Reviewer Cat, Hildegard, and our adoption of another Aldi Reviewer Cat, Beatrice.

2025: Honing Our Craft in the Midst of Uncertainty

In 2024, Google introduced changes that impacted search. That, combined with the rapid growth of AI, created new challenges in a world that never stands still. Aldi didn’t do us any favors, either, introducing a new Aldi ad format that was harder to navigate. We decided that the best thing we could do in 2025 was to continue to do what we do best, while also being aware of all the changes.

Despite everything swirling around us, it proved a good year. A major focus of ours in 2025 was updating a lot of our existing content. Aldi has been selling many of the same products for years, sometimes with minimal or no changes, and we found ourselves coming back to modernize our photos and offer progress reports on how products had held up over time. Of course, we also continued to try our hand with new Aldi products, too.

2026: The Journey Continues

As Aldi Reviewer has sailed into its tenth year, we’ve continued to work hard to provide the most comprehensive coverage of the world’s fastest-growing grocery company. In many ways, the work in 2026 isn’t all that different than it was in 2016: we write about Aldi products and create a space where people can talk about them. Of course, the internet is a different landscape now, and we’ve worked to adapt to that space even as we’ve sought to provide the nuts-and-bolts information that we know people want when they go searching for all things Aldi.

More than anything, in 2026, we’re grateful. We’re grateful that we’ve had the chance to write in this little niche, and we’re grateful for everyone who has found their way to our site. Most importantly, we’re grateful for the chance to help people along the way, whether it’s giving them valuable information about a product or helping them troubleshoot a finicky Aldi Find. If we’ve been able to make people’s lives a little more joyful and a little easier, we’re all for it.

Thank you to everyone who has been along for the ride so far. Our journey continues.