Odd Lots · Friday, July 3, 2026
Aldi intentionally limits its product selection, offering significantly fewer SKUs than competitors to enhance efficiency and customer confidence. Scott Patton highlighted that by offering only two ketchup varieties compared to a competitor's thirty to forty, Aldi streamlines restocking and empowers customers to make confident purchasing decisions with less overwhelm.
“We have two thousand skews in the store, probably four thousand varieties. Now let's take the ketchup example. So we just talked about the typical store is going to have thirty to forty varieties, and as you asked, we have two. I would simply ask the customer, do you really need forty choices for ketchups?”
“So we have four different varieties of olive oil. Four is a pretty good selection for our store. You're gonna have organic, you're gonna have Sicilian, you're gonna have pure, and you kind of extravergent. Good selection. If you're a consumer faced with sixty different choices of olive oil, how do you know which one to buy?”
“So we have two. There's I would call the data point would be private label penetration. We look at private label how accepting our customers of private label in that space in that category.”