Asda ditches Aldi and Lidl price-match scheme just a year after launch
Asda ditches Aldi and Lidl price-match scheme just a year after launch
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Supermarket to roll out its own price cuts campaign with new boss keen not to ‘dance to the tune of the discounters’. Asda is ditching its Aldi and Lidl price-match scheme just a year after launching it, as the UK’s fourth-largest supermarket chain battles to win back shoppers amid rising costs.
Stopping the scheme in favour of a wider “Rollback” price cuts campaign is one of the most dramatic moves yet by Asda’s new chair, Allan Leighton, who returned to run Asda late last year more than two decades after quitting as chief executive. He now wants to take greater control of Asda’s price messaging and not be seen to be “dancing to the tune of the discounters”, according to the Grocer trade journal, which first reported the changes.
Asda is desperate to lift sales and stem a rapid decline in its share of the grocery market. In the final three months of last year, sales dived by 5.8% at the Leeds-based chain, according to analysts at Kantar, making it the only big supermarket to record falling sales in the period.
An Asda spokesperson said: “We’re focused on our own great ‘Asda Prices’ not competitor comparisons. We’ve started 2025 as we mean to go on by cutting prices on thousands of products and there’s much more to come with Rollback.”. The changes come as Simon Roberts, the boss of the UK’s second-largest supermarket, Sainsbury’s, called on the government to link its aims for economic growth to an anticipated food strategy.
Roberts said taking into account efforts to manage farming more sustainably, for example by using anaerobic digesters and other technology to deal with the problem of chicken manure or waste energy to heat greenhouses, should help farms gain planning permission for expansion.
