Transparency & Traceability
The ALDI SÜD Group works closely with business partners to enhance transparency and traceability across our supply chains. We seek to better understand the origins of the products we sell and the raw materials used in their production, while supporting customers in making informed purchasing decisions.
Why is traceability so important?
The products we offer have a journey that spans multiple suppliers, factories, farms and countries around the world. Their complexity varies depending on the product.
For example, bananas are typically sourced from a single farm or plantation and remain identifiable throughout most of their journey, whereas cocoa often passes through multiple intermediaries, is mixed with beans from different farms during collection and processing and is combined with other ingredients before becoming chocolate. Even for products with relatively simple supply chains, improving traceability requires collaboration across many farms, suppliers, countries and information systems.
Improving traceability and transparency helps us identify and address sustainability risks, supports responsible sourcing practices, and enables us to work with our suppliers to contribute to positive environmental and social outcomes throughout selected supply chains.
As supply chains differ between products and sourcing regions, we tailor our approach to traceability and transparency accordingly. We have initiatives in place to strengthen supply chain visibility across selected product categories.
Transparency
The public disclosure of supply chain actors and facilities, showing who is involved in producing a product and where they are located. Transparency focuses on making supplier information openly accessible and meaningful to stakeholders.
Traceability
The ability to track and verify the journey of a specific material or product through the supply chain, showing how and when it moves between suppliers and production stages. Traceability documents the chain of custody from origin to finished product.
Coffee
We work closely with our suppliers to enhance transparency across the coffee supply chain, enabling us to trace the origin of products and raw materials used. This also helps us to ensure that our responsible sourcing requirements – such as our commitment to eliminating deforestation and land conversion from our critical supply– are met and that potential human rights and environmental risks are managed effectively.
Fruits & Vegetables
Enhancing transparency in our fruit and vegetables supply chains strengthens our ability to identify risks and ensure compliance (such as the Lieferkettengesetz LkSG in Germany). The ALDI SÜD Group has implemented comprehensive processes – including risk analyses, audits, and supplier assessments – to systematically identify actual and potential social and environmental risks across our selected supply chains. We aim to progressively integrate these sustainability-related metrics to embed responsible sourcing considerations into our purchasing decisions and increase supply chain resilience.
Fish & Seafood
Traceability is an important tool for managing legality, environmental, and social risks within fish and seafood supply chains. The ALDI SÜD Group requires full supply chain traceability and transparency. Fish and seafood suppliers of ALDI’s private label products are also required to report on a quarterly basis on the raw material origin into the Sustainable Fisheries Partnership (SFP) metrics platform. We work closely with our business partners to continuously expand the transparency of our supply chains and improve existing traceability tools.
Nuts
We work closely with our business partners and industry stakeholders to better understand where our nut products originate and to support greater transparency within our supply chains. Because each nut supply chain is different, we use approaches that are tailored to the specific characteristics of each product. Through long-term supplier partnerships and targeted traceability programmes, we can identify the processing origin of every container sourced through our transparent sourcing model for selected nut products.
CHOCO CHANGER – tracking every bean back to its origin
We have joined Tony’s Open Chain and adopted its five Sourcing Principles, including traceability. All cocoa beans sourced for our Choceur CHOCO CHANGER bars are 100% traceable. This helps increase transparency in our supply chain by providing visibility into where, when, how, and by whom the beans were grown and harvested.
All farms within our partner cooperatives are GPS polygon-mapped and assessed against environmentally-protected areas and for deforestation risk. Tony’s robust BeanTracker traceability system monitors bean origins, yield quantities, and movements through supply chain actors, from farms to warehouses, lorry loading, and shipping.
Our ALDI production partners and facilities
Building greater visibility across our supply chains requires close collaboration with our business and production partners. They play a key role in implementing ALDI’s social and environmental standards and supporting responsible sourcing throughout our selected supply chains.
As part of our commitment to greater supply chain transparency, we disclose the names and addresses of suppliers for selected food and non-food products. We also contribute supplier information to the Open Supply Hub, helping standardise supplier data, improve supply chain mapping and enable greater collaboration across shared supply chains.
This overview represents the countries of final production facilities for ALDI Non-Food products based on 2025 Buying Volume, with a breakdown of primary and minority sourcing.
All countries with minimal Buying Volume (< 0.5%) are excluded from this overview.
This overview represents the countries of final production facilities for ALDI Processed Food products as well as growers countries for ALDI Fresh Produce products based on 2025 Buying Volume, with a breakdown of primary and minority sourcing.
All countries with minimal Buying Volume (<0.5%) are excluded from this overview.
Product information and transparency
Making information about our products more accessible is one way to support greater transparency across selected supply chains. For a range of product categories and national markets, we provide digital tools that enable customers to access additional information about the origin and journey of products as well as aspects of their sourcing.
Check Your Product
The Check Your Product platform provides customers with additional transparency on fish, meat, and soy products. This platform is available in Austria, Switzerland, Slovenia and Hungary.
ALDI Transparency Code
ALDI SÜD Germany uses the ALDI Transparency Code (ATC) platform to provide greater transparency for fish, meat, and egg products. By scanning a QR code or entering the tracking number, customers can access information about the origin and journey of these products.
