Coming To Aldi: Vital Proteins Collagen Peptides

Last Updated on July 9, 2023

This post is an open thread and contains affiliate links.

The New Year always comes with New Year’s Resolutions, which for many people involves a plan to get into better health. Aldi is all over this annual rite, selling exercise equipment for both strength and cardio. Aldi also pivots to selling more healthy foods after a long holiday indulging in stuff that tastes great but may not be the best for your waistline.

We sometimes see Aldi roll out supplements during the New Year. Vitamins are an obvious example, but we’ve seen more surprising offerings, too. In the first ad of 2022, Aldi featured a product we’d never seen at Aldi before: collagen peptides.

Collagen peptides are tiny pieces of protein from animal collagen. Collagen is a component of animal cartilage, bone, and skin. Because the human body produces less collagen as we age, some believe that collagen peptides can be a way of protecting and rejuvenating skin and joints, promoting skin elasticity, improving joint strength, and increasing muscle durability. The result, they claim, will include fewer wrinkles and less joint pain.

Does it work? Looking online at medical sites and interviews with medial professionals, the answers seem to range from yes, to maybe, to no. I’ll leave it up to you to decide what to make of all that.

Let’s look more closely at the product Aldi is selling.

What We Know:

Vital Proteins Collagen Peptides (Product Code: 703241) are an Aldi Find. That means they’re only in stores for a limited time, and once they’re gone, they’re gone. Aldi won’t ship them. Vital Proteins is a national brand, not an Aldi exclusive, so you can find it — and other collagen protein powders — at other retailers and outlets, including supplement stores, big box stores, and online sellers.

At the time of this post, Aldi is selling this product in a 10-ounce container for $24.98. That’s around $2.50 an ounce. Prices for collagen peptides vary online, with costs currently ranging from $1.50 to $3.00 per ounce. The Aldi price isn’t the lowest price for collagen proteins, although it currently matches the price for this specific product on Amazon. (Amazon prices, of course, can and do fluctuate.)

The company behind this product, Vital Proteins, was founded in 2013 and was acquired in 2020 by Nestlé Health Science, a subsidiary of international food and nutrition giant Nestlé. Vital Proteins deals primarily in collagen-based products.

Vital Proteins does maintain a website, but I am not linking to it here. There’s a reason: in writing this post, I visited the Vital Proteins website to learn more about the company. Within an hour, I received an email “thanking me for stopping by.” The problem? I had not given the company my email address on any form, pop-up or otherwise. Instead, the company somehow acquired my email in another way, possibly through cookies on my browser. I can’t personally recall a time when visiting a site has led to me being subscribed to an email list without my knowledge or consent. 

That experience also led me to look a little deeper into reviews of the company. On the Better Business Bureau site, for instance, the company currently has 34 complaints. Most of those complaints relate to problems related to orders and subscriptions through the Vital Proteins website, including difficulties contacting the company to resolve problems. This may not be as relevant to someone buying the product through Aldi, but it is worth being aware of.

On the other hand, the company’s products seem to be well-reviewed. Amazon sells many Vital Proteins products, and most of them have 4.5 to 5 star ratings. In some cases, the products have thousands or even hundreds of thousands of positive reviews.

What We Don’t Know:

We’ve never tried collagen peptides before, so we couldn’t tell you how well they work at doing the things that they’re advertised as being able to do. That’s why we’ve created this open thread for visitors to share their experiences.

Have you tried Vital Proteins Collagen Peptides — or any collagen peptides — before? Let us know about your experiences in the comments.