Aldi adding 4 more LI grocery stores as discounter pushes fast growth

Aldi is continuing its rapid expansion on Long Island, where the discount grocer has 15 stores — including nine that have opened in the last five years — and plans to open four more by summer 2026.

The chain is one of the fastest-growing grocers nationwide, due in part to it widening its appeal to middle-class shoppers, retail experts said.

Aldi recently signed a lease to open a store at 38 Great Neck Road in The Gardens at Great Neck shopping center.  The approximately 21,000-square-foot store will take about half of the space vacated in 2021 by a Best Market supermarket, which had opened in a former Waldbaum's grocery store space five years earlier. 

Aldi is tentatively scheduled to open in Great Neck in summer 2026, according to the Germany-based grocer.

The Great Neck location is a needed coverage area for Aldi, said Chris Daniels, vice president of the grocer’s South Windsor Division.

"It’s a high-traffic area, close to our customers. But we also have a little bit of a gap in our market, where our next nearest store we’ve got some distance from," he said.

The closest Aldi to the Great Neck location is 6.4 miles away in Carle Place.

Newsday previously reported that three more Long Island stores will open this year. One will be in Medford, although the opening will be delayed a few months to late May or early June, and two others will open in Bethpage and Lake Ronkonkoma in late summer, Daniels said.

Aldi, which entered the Long Island market in 2011 with a store in Bay Shore, has been expanding quickly on the Island in the past several years.

Since 2020, nine Aldi stores have opened on Long Island, including locations in Bohemia, Central Islip, Hempstead, Rocky Point and Valley Stream.

Changing perceptions

Aldi, which opened its first U.S. store in Iowa in 1976, is now one of the fastest-growing grocers in the nation, where it has more than 2,400 stores in 38 states, including nearly 120 stores that opened last year.

The rapid growth is due in part to Aldi improving the appearance of its stores, starting about 15 years ago, said Jon Hauptman, founder of Price Dimensions, a Chicago-based pricing strategy consulting firm for grocery stores.  The changes made them more appealing to higher-income consumers, a growing number of whom have been concerned about inflation in recent years, he said.

"While Aldi was once a budget-oriented store frequented by bargain shoppers who couldn’t afford to shop elsewhere, Aldi now appeals to shoppers across all income levels with their outstanding offering of affordable and high-quality (and often unique) products," he said in an email.

Aldi performs well on Long Island, where its average per-store sales — both in the dollars spent and number of items purchased per customer — are higher than those in most markets across the country, Daniels said.

Nationwide last year, among all stores that sold groceries, including warehouse clubs and convenience stores, discounter Walmart was the largest grocery retailer, with 20.9% of the market share, while Aldi ranked eighth, with 3% of the market share, according to Numerator, a Chicago-based market research firm.

On Long Island, traditional supermarket chain Stop & Shop ranked first, though it is losing some market share to competitors.

Stop & Shop had 18.2% of the market share as of March 2024, down from 20.08% in 2021, according to a June report from Food Trade News, a Columbia, Maryland-based publication.

Aldi made the Long Island list for the first time in 2023, and ranked 19th last year, with 0.90% of the market share.

A growth plan

In February, Aldi said it planned to open a record 225 U.S. stores this year as part of its five-year growth strategy, announced in March 2024, to invest more than $9 billion to add 800 new U.S. stores by the end of 2028.

Aldi’s expansion plan includes opening completely new stores and converting some Winn-Dixie and Harveys Supermarket stores it bought last year, with about 220 of those stores becoming Aldi through 2027.

In March 2024, Aldi acquired Southeastern Grocers and its approximately 400 Winn-Dixie stores and Harveys Supermarkets in Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana and Mississippi, which will "support Aldi expansion in a key region," the company said.

Last month, Aldi said it had closed a transaction to divest about 170 Winn-Dixie and Harveys Supermarket stores that are not part of the Aldi conversion plan to a consortium that includes C & S Wholesale Grocers, Southeastern Grocers senior leadership and private investors.

By Tory N. Parrish

tory.parrish@newsday.comToryParrish1

Tory N. Parrish covers retail and small business for Newsday. She has worked at the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review and Observer-Dispatch in Utica, N.Y.