What Happens To The Returned Items At Aldi?

Aldi is well-known as a great place for grocery shopping on a budget, but you may not know that it's also a great place to return unwanted purchases. Aldi's return policy is so generous that employees feel like some customers take advantage of it, like by returning mostly eaten snacks for alleged dissatisfaction. Legitimate or otherwise, it's clear that the grocery chain gets a lot of returns. But what happens to all that stuff?

While Aldi itself doesn't publicly reveal where returned items go, Reddit comments from Aldi employees and their family members indicate that returned food items are generally thrown away. This includes everything from unopened items to scammy returns of nearly finished bags of potato chips.

A few Aldi employees have also reported on Reddit that their stores might donate returned items that are both unopened and nonperishable, or encourage customers to do the same because the store will have to throw them out. But whether it's the majority of stores that simply trash the items or the few that might donate some, a returned Aldi item will never see an Aldi sales floor again.

Aldi throwing away most (if not all) of its returns might seem wasteful, but from the company's perspective, it has good reasons for doing so. Think of why you should avoid returning frozen items to the freezer while shopping: Grocers are required to limit a frozen item's time out of the freezer for food-safety reasons, and they have no way of knowing how long it thawed in your cart.

Similarly, Aldi can't be certain of the conditions in which a returned item was kept, even if it's still sealed. For instance, a can of black beans may have spent a few hours (or more) in a hot, 120-degree-Fahrenheit car after the customer noticed it wasn't what they wanted and left it in the trunk until their next Aldi run. That can would look alright from the outside, but the beans probably spoiled in the intense heat.

So, if you bring an Aldi product back to the store, it's a near certainty that the store will throw it away out of an abundance of caution. But don't give up on an unsatisfactory Aldi product: The company often makes unannounced changes to its store-brand items, so the caramel popcorn you didn't like six months ago might be delicious now. We recommend carefully reading the label for any differences so you don't contribute to food waste with another Aldi return.