'They Taste Like Cardboard Now': Aldi Superfans Say These 9 Products Have Gone Downhill

Aldi doesn’t exactly roll out the red carpet for its customers. Rather, the German supermarket chain embraces its austere roots, foregoing flashy displays, gratis shopping bags, and baggers in favor of thrifty minimalism and rock-bottom prices. And even in the U.S., the quality-to-price ratio is so alluring that it’s become one of the most popular grocery stores in the country. 

But some loyal Aldi customers on Reddit have turned against the retailer, claiming that a whole slew of products have gone downhill. We’ve listed the worst of the worst here so that you can avoid these products on your next visit.

Related: I Shopped at Aldi for the First Time and Here's What I Learned

Aldi’s pre-made salads may still be convenient, but one Redditor says that they’re “almost all cabbage now with no greens.” They’re also a victim of the worst type of shrinkflation: The prices have gone up and the packages have gotten smaller. “I was so tired of eating cabbage,” another commenter adds.

Related: 5 Trader Joe's Products That Fans Say Have Gone Downhill

Fans of Aldi’s oyster crackers have been on an emotional roller coaster. Aldi discontinued them, only to bring back an inferior version that shoppers describe as “bleh” and “way too salty.”

Related: 30 Things to Know Before Shopping at Aldi

You might wonder: How can you screw up a banana? They’re generally cheap, protected by a peel, and taste more or less the same wherever you buy ‘em. But Aldi has somehow managed to tick customers off with its bananas, which one commenter says are either “brown at the store” or “green until the end of time.”

Related: The Aldi Family Feud And Its Connection to Trader Joe's

A crunchy chicken salad sounds good in theory, but it depends on what’s giving the salad its crunch. Croutons? Lovely. Chicken cartilage? Not so much. Unfortunately, Aldi’s salad suffers from the latter, shoppers say.

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Just as you don’t want your salad to be “gristly,” you don’t want your chicken breast to be “woody.” But that’s the reality at Aldi, where customers say the breast meat has dropped in quality. And if the idea of tough, woody chicken isn’t repulsive enough, then it’s worth knowing the cause: Genetically modified broiler chickens grow so fast that their muscles degrade.

Aldi’s selection of cheap frozen pizzas has gone up in price and down in quality, Redditors say, with one commenter writing that “they taste like cardboard now.” “Corporate greed ended Aldi frozen pizzas for me,” another commenter replies. “I used to find something good in that freezer every week. Now the prices have been jacked up so much I don't even look.”

Like bananas, baked beans are pretty hard to screw up. And yet, somehow Aldi managed to make its newest version taste “awful.”

Multiple shoppers are in agreement that Aldi’s blocks of cheese have seen a nosedive in quality. They don’t taste horrible; they just taste like nothing, Redditors say.

Food items aren’t the only products at Aldi to see a drop in quality. Candles aren’t what they used to be either, with the scents becoming so “meh” that one customer “completely stopped buying them.” One savvy shopper says that they stick to just two scents now: Gardenia and Mountain Air.