Cape May County shoppers will get a new supermarket option when Aldi opens Nov. 17 in Middle Township’s Rio Grande section.
Officials of Aldi, a German discount chain that’s grown quickly around the U.S. in recent years, plan to open the Rio Grande store with a ribbon-cutting ceremony and prize giveaway about 8:45 on that Thursday morning.
Aldi is much smaller in its footprint and its product line than the typical American supermarket. A company website says it looks for spaces of about 17,000 square feet and stocks roughly 1,400 of the best-selling items from the grocery-store lineup.
For comparison, the Village ShopRite in Somers Point is about 80,000 square feet, according to the owner of the shopping center where it’s based. And the Food Marketing Institute reports that as of 2014, the average U.S. supermarket carried more than 42,000 different products.
The chain carries mostly products under its own brand and typically has small staffs in its stores.
The chain now counts more than 1,600 U.S. stores in 34 states. And Bob Grammer, the vice president for the Center Valley Division of Aldi, said in an interview earlier this year that the management plans to grow to about 2,000 stores in the country by by 2018.
South Jersey figures in those growth plans. Along with Middle Township, Aldi expects to open a store before the end of this year in Manahawkin, part of Ocean County’s Stafford Township. The chain plans an event in Manahawkin Nov. 15 to hire staff for the store there and one in Toms River, Aldi’s website says.
Plus Egg Harbor Township’s planning board gave conditional approval this year to a new Aldi location on the Black Horse Pike, west of English Creek Road.
But Aldi has come and gone in at least one South Jersey location. A branch of the chain opened in 1995 in the Pleasantville Shopping Center on the Black Horse Pike, in a section of a former Acme. But by 2000, Aldi had pulled out of Pleasantville.
The Rio Grande Aldi is in the Grande Shopping Center, at 3201 Route 9 South. The store will take over a space that had stayed mostly empty since a former Stop & Shop closed there in 2007.
Officials of the chain said next week’s grand opening in Rio Grande will include giveaways of “gold-ticket” gift cards, in varying amounts, to the first 100 people who show up to shop. And one customer will win free produce from the store for a year, according to Aldi.