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

When you write about the same topic for ten years — ten years! — you create a lot of memories. Some of those memories are mundane ones: strolling an aisle looking for products to write about, or spotting a limited buy that captures your attention. Some of the memories are a lot more unique, like picking up products at an Aldi store a thousand miles from home while on vacation or taking Aldi products on a camping trip. Some of the memories are positive, while others are laced with sadness.

Suffice to say, we’ve got a lot of memories. So here, in this third part of our ten-year retrospective, we revisit some of our top memories.

Our First Big Review: The Sempre Digital Weather Station

When we launched Aldi Reviewer in 2016, our earliest posts were mostly a mix of everyday buys and features. We also sprinkled in a couple of limited buys. As a tribute to how long ago that was, Aldi at the time referred to those limited buys as Special Buys, which the grocer has long since renamed Aldi Finds.

The Sempre Digital Weather Station, a Special Buy, was exactly what it sounded like — a weather station with an outdoor sensor that allowed for both indoor and outdoor temperature and humidity readings. It also synced with the U.S. atomic clock for pitch-perfect time. We’d already had it for a while when we wrote about it in early July of 2016, so we were able to talk a lot about its qualities and its quirks. Other people had a lot to say, too: it’s got more than 120 comments, and it led our site in pageviews for several weeks.

For all those reasons, it’s one of the first real positive memories we have of our writing.

An Enduring Pro Tip: How to Cook Oven Ready Lasagna Noodles

In March of 2017, Rachael published an inauspicious review of Reggano Oven Ready Lasagna Noodles. The noodles are made in such a way that you can put them in the oven uncooked with water (with other lasagna ingredients), and in the earliest boxes there were both simple instructions as well as an excellent, comprehensive recipe. We detailed that recipe in our post, which you can still find here.

At some point, though, Aldi’s supplier removed the recipe, leaving shoppers with instructions that weren’t nearly as helpful. Adding to the confusion, the instructions on the new boxes called for different water amounts than in years past. In 2022, Rachael penned an updated piece that adapted a family lasagna recipe.

Both posts have garnered ongoing pageviews and comments from shoppers confused by the box. We’re happy to have been able to help sort this one out over the years.

A Recurring Piece With a Side of Hilarity: When People Think We’re Aldi

There have been a few unexpected twists to being an Aldi blogger, but none more than the emails and comments we’ve gotten over the years thinking we’re Aldi. It ought to be plainly obvious we’re not Aldi — we don’t even use the same color scheme.

Over the years, we’ve added disclaimers in various places, including our About page and Contact page, to make it clear we’re not affiliated with Aldi. We even make people check off a box on our Contact page acknowledging that we’re not Aldi. None of that has stopped people from reaching out thinking we’re Aldi.

So what do we do with all those emails and comments? Well, we’ve published them. We take out names and other identifying information, of course, like addresses and phone numbers. But we leave in every single typo. We published our first round back in 2017; our 14th edition published in February of 2026. We get a smile each time.

The Start of a Site Staple: This Week at Aldi

In 2017, I pitched the idea of starting up a regular feature called This Week at Aldi. The idea was simple: catalog all the Aldi Finds coming out that upcoming week. Not only would it give our readers a preview of the latest limited buys, but it would also serve as a repository for the weekly ad. Both then and now, Aldi scrubs old ads from its website once they’ve passed, so if you want to see what Aldi sold even two weeks ago, you’re out of luck. By maintaining our own archive, readers can still search for ads even as time has passed. It’s also proven invaluable to us to go back and see when Aldi has sold certain Finds and what the grocer charger for them.

I wrote the first few This Week at Aldi features, a job Rachael now manages. It continues to be both a valuable resource and a popular post on our site.

A Little Investigative Journalism: An Aldi Desk Warranty

Early on, we got the idea to write about our warranty experiences when they came up. It’s not really an area we write as much anymore — at the time of this post, we haven’t penned a warranty piece since 2021 — but we did feel like the work gave us valuable insight into the different companies that are contracted out to handle warranty claims.

Most of those posts turned out to be simple affairs. But not all. In 2018, we bought a writing desk and chair to review. The chair was fine, while the desk had a few cosmetic issues. Rachael contacted the desk warranty company hoping for maybe a simple replacement part or two; what happened instead was a months-long odyssey in which we found ourselves going back and forth with an apparently lean operation in New York City.

We don’t think the piece will win a Pulitzer or anything, but as far as work that involved both time and research, it’s a personal favorite of ours.

Long-form Writing: How to Write a Niche Product Review Blog

When Aldi Reviewer was a few years old, I starting thinking about writing a different kind of post based on my experiences. I’d learned a lot about the blogging business in that time, and I had the inkling to share those insights with a larger audience. For that reason, I penned a piece going step-by-step on how to create a niche product review blog. At almost 4,500 words, it’s one of the longest — if not the longest — long-form nonfiction blog posts I’ve ever written.

Here’s what I said early on in the piece:

Product review blogs are awesome because they fill a need: namely, for people to find out if a product is any good before they go out and buy it themselves. Every day, people hear about or see a product and do a search to see if it’s any good. Sometimes they find what what they need … and sometimes they don’t. That second category is where opportunity can lie.

The internet has changed a lot since then, with the growth of social media and the advent of things like AI. Still, I’m proud of the sweat I put into that one, and I’m just as proud of the work on Aldi Reviewer that informed my writing of that post.

Aldi Reviewer in Virginia

In the summer of 2019, we took a trip from the Midwest out to western Virginia to see family and do a bit of sightseeing. We needed groceries while on our road trip, so we swung by the local Aldi to get food and other supplies. While there, I noticed a small clock in the Aldi Find section that seemed like a good review topic. I took it back to the AirBnB we were staying at and worked up the review in the house’s little office. It was the first time I’d written a piece for the site away from home.

A couple of days later, we had an Aldi event of an entirely different sort. We’d been out at a family gathering in a rural part of Virginia, and while there we had, unbeknownst to us, driven over a nail. We awoke to a flat tire. We had recently purchased an Aldi tire inflator, and we were able to use it to put enough air in the tire to get us to a shop, which patched the tire for us.

The Curious Case of Aldi L’Oven Fresh Zero Net Carbs Bread

In the fall of 2019, Aldi sold a keto-friendly zero net carbs bread as a limited time Aldi Find. We set out to pick up a loaf to write about it. To our surprise — and apparently Aldi’s, too — the bread vanished from shelves almost immediately. When the grocer tried to reintroduce it as a Regular Buy a few months later, that vanished, too. Only later did we get our hands on a loaf. The grocer’s suppliers appeared to be unable to cope with the demand.

During the wine calendar craze of 2018, we’d learned to lean into covering the cult of Aldi. We did the same with the keto bread, following its releases and re-releases during a very entertaining few months. We had great fun keeping our readers informed of the whole little saga as it unfolded.

Our Oscars: The AR Awards

Each winter, as the year comes to a close, we put together a post celebrating the best and worst of the year for Aldi, with a slice of Trader Joe’s. It’s always a blast, combing back through our news, reviews, and features for that year, and deciding what takes top billing for that year. We put out our first award piece in December of 2019; our seventh annual installment landed in December of 2025.

Our COVID Coverage in 2020

There was nothing great about what happened to the world in 2020, especially early 2020. COVID and its aftereffects created challenges for everyone, including grocers and shoppers. Those challenges reverberated for years, through post-pandemic supply shortages and inflation.

We are proud, though, of our comprehensive coverage of the pandemic. We were there during the big grocery rushes in mid-March, and we wrote exhaustively about how Aldi and Trader Joe’s were dealing with an ever-evolving situation, including the evolution of Aldi Finds during that time. As much as COVID dominated the news in 2020, we worked hard to stay on top of how it impacted our niche.

Aldi Reviewer @ Disney World

After years of saving, we took our family on a long-overdue trip to Disney World in 2024. It was a truly magical trip from start to finish. It was also a trip where we got to put our Aldi skills to use. For one, we used Instacart to have a stock of Aldi breakfast foods and snacks delivered to our resort.

For another, we were able to put a number of Aldi Finds to use on the trip, from portable power banks to hats.

Better still, because Aldi had just recently sold a number of Disney-themed bags and accessories, we were able to bring those along, too.

Visiting the Aldigo Checkout-Free Store in Aurora, Illinois

Not long after our trip to Disney World, we found ourselves in the suburbs of Chicago, Illinois, visiting the pilot store for Aldigo, a checkout-free technology the grocer has been working on. It was a fascinating experience: we picked things up off the shelves, went to the checkout, paid, and left, all without scanning a single item. It wasn’t flawless, but it was a really interesting glimpse into the future of grocery shopping.

The Aldi Reviewer Cat(s)

When we started Aldi Reviewer in 2016, we had a 10-year-old cat in the house. We’d adopted her from the local Humane Society in July of 2006, when she was just a few months old. We never intended for Hildegard — we called her Hilde (pronounced Hill-dee) — to be a part of the AR story, but she managed to work her way in, sniffing out Aldi products or hiding in Aldi boxes.

Hilde lived a long life by cat standards, passing away in September of 2025 at the ripe age of 18 1/2. As you might expect, Hilde’s death left a hole in the family. She’d been part of our married life almost from the beginning, and our kids didn’t know a world without her.

We took time to commemorate her, both here and in private. We also decided, after talking it over as a family, to take a look at adopting another cat. We returned to the same Humane Society shelter we’d adopted Hilde from in 2006. One of our kids suggested we adopt an older cat, one that wouldn’t be as likely to be adopted by other families. We landed on a 7-year-old black cat who, while dealing with some mild health problems, appeared friendly and affectionate.

We took her home and gave her a new name: Beatrice, or Bea for short. She endeared herself to the family almost immediately, proving to be a gentle soul and a lap cat. She also took up the mantle as the next Aldi Reviewer Cat, getting into Aldi products with all the enthusiasm Hilde once did. We hope to have her around for years to come.

Closing Thoughts:

When we first launched Aldi Reviewer, all we knew was that we were going to do our best to write about Aldi products. We’ve done that, and we’re proud of what we’ve accomplished.

What we didn’t know — couldn’t know — is that, ten years later, we’d not only still be here but that we would have accumulated the kind of special memories we have. Many of those memories are about specific product reviews, but others are about different aspects of the blog, including the places we’ve gone. And while there is some sadness in there, too, there is also much joy.

We hope to continue making joyful memories in the future. Along the way, we hope we can continue to serve our readers well.