It tops the charts almost every month as Britain’s cheapest supermarket – but when I tried to shop in Aldi, I ran into one major problem, which means I can never go back. No, I wasn’t banned from Aldi for using an Asda carrier bag or something silly. The reason I can’t go back is simply because there’s very little food that’s certified safe for me to eat.
I suffer from a lifelong, incurable condition called Coeliac Disease. It’s one of those ‘invisible illnesses’ that nobody would know about, apart from when they see me tucking into an overpriced and flavourless gluten-free sandwich, not by choice but because quite a lot of normal food is unsafe for me to eat. In short, Coeliac is an autoimmune condition, a defect in which causes my immune system to identify gluten as a dangerous invader and makes my insides attack themselves. It’s not actually an allergy like wheat allergy, though both Coeliacs and wheat allergy folk need gluten-free food. Eventually, it leads to an early death if left undiagnosed due to malnutrition and often, cancer. The only treatment is, unfortunately, eating expensive and often hard-to-find gluten-free food.
There isn’t an Aldi especially near me, but with the budget supermarket so regularly coming out as the cheapest supermarket, and Asda, my usual choice, often being more expensive than Aldi, I thought I’d give Aldi a spin.
Unfortunately, it did not go well. Of course, Aldi does stock many foods which are ‘naturally gluten free’ – think fruit and veg, fresh unprocessed meat (like raw unbreaded chicken), rice, milk and cheese. These are foods which wouldn’t have any gluten in anyway, and every retailer stocks.
But I couldn’t eat a normal diet if Aldi were my only supermarket. Having scanned up and down every aisle, amazingly, at my nearest Aldi in Leeds, there was just one certified gluten-free item available that I could find in the whole store: pasta. And unlike at Asda, Sainsbury’s, Tesco, Morrisons, and Waitrose, this was vegan chickpea pasta or vegan lentil pasta, not normal gluten-free pasta.
There was no gluten-free bread, no gluten-free cooking sauces, no gluten-free flour, no gluten-free cereal (either boxed cereal like corn flakes or raw oats like porridge or muesli), no gluten-free frozen food, no gluten-free chocolate, crisps or snacks. While I could eat enough to live, eating a regular diet while shopping in Aldi would be impossible.
By contrast, this is just some of what’s available in my relatively small local Asda’s gluten-free bread aisle alone: white bread, brown bread, seeded brown bread, brioche buns, paninis, baguettes, crumpets, tortilla wraps, tiger bloomer, bread rolls, pitta breads, ciabatta breads, bagels and waffles.
In the cereal section, we have gluten-free: corn flakes, honey nut flakes, rice crispies, three flavours of muesli, porridge oats (three flavours), fibre flakes, Honey Hoops, Choco Snaps, Frosted Flakes and Rainbow Hoops. Not including four flavours of gluten free breakfast biscuits.
In the same aisle, Asda also has five flavours of gluten-free crisps, three different GF cooking sauces, GF gravy, flour, biscuits, cakes, crackers, chocolate and four types of GF pasta (that’s not vegan). And in the frozen section, there’s GF pizza, pies, fish fingers and lasagne, to name a few. None of which is stocked at my local Aldi that I could find. It’s the same story at Morrisons, Sainsbury’s and Tesco, all of which have similarly extensive gluten-free ranges at all their stores, not just in their giant superstores. Even my local tiny Tesco Express has a dedicated gluten-free section, including bread, flour, cereal, beer, crisps and chocolate, which blows Aldi out of the water.
According to Coeliac UK, 1 in 100 people in this country have Coeliac Disease, which is approximately 700,000 people. That’s 700,000 people who can’t really shop at Aldi and have a normal diet, or have to go elsewhere to get their gluten-free foods afterwards. And a total of 10% of the population follow a GF diet, whether due to an intolerance, Coeliac, or just due to personal diet reasons, which is seven million people looking for GF food.
Aldi came back to my query about its gluten-free offerings, and stressed that it has more than 100 gluten free foods available, including naturally gluten free foods like rice, and labelled gluten free foods like cereal and crisps, but I could find none of these GF labelled foods at my branch expect the pasta, and even that was a vegan version of it.
I definitely applaud any retailer which looks to do more for the millions of people in this country who struggle to find affordable and varied gluten-free products and if Aldi rolls out more GF food to more stores, that would be great news. But right now, I and those like me just can’t go back to Aldi because it’s still miles away from the range and variety of food I can get at Asda, Morrisons, Sainsbury’s or Tesco.
An Aldi spokesperson told the Express: “We want everyone to have access to our low prices, including people with specific dietary requirements. We offer around 100 gluten-free alternative products, alongside an excellent range of fresh meat, fish, fruit, vegetables, rice and dairy products which are naturally gluten-free.”