Providing a wide range of service areas from site layouts to construction administration, ms consultants is helping ALDI, Inc. grow its brand image and market share in the United States.
ALDI entered the U.S. market in 1976, opening its first store in southeastern Iowa. Concentrating on providing customers with food at the lowest price possible, the chain quickly found its niche within the grocery retailing market. Serving Europe, Australia and now with more than 1,600 stores in 35 states in the United States, ALDI has established itself as an international industry leader.
Not only has the number of stores grown, but so have the product offerings. Originally, the store started with 500 brand products, but today offers more than 1,300 regularly stocked items – including refrigerated and frozen foods, fresh meats, beer and wine.
The retailer picked ms consultants as a teammate because of its ability to provide comprehensive and streamlined services in varying disciplines – for both ALDI prototypes and existing buildings.
For a prototypical new store design, ms prepares a site layout based on ALDI’s desired building footprint – this determines if the site will satisfy the requirements of building and parking needs, truck (for deliveries) and pedestrian access, and landscape design. Once a site layout has been prepared and approved, construction documents are prepared for civil engineering, architectural, mechanical, electrical, plumbing and structural engineering aspects of the project. ms provides bidding assistance for contractor selection and provides construction administration services.
ms also provides services for retrofitting existing spaces. This process begins by architects preparing a design fit layout based on the chosen prototypical ALDI store layout, which helps the design team and client determine if the space can provide proper customer traffic flow and other basic requirements for an ALDI store. These requirements include freezer and cooler locations, truck access, and storage for shopping carts.
Once approved, ms prepares construction documents for the site-adapted prototype store, in addition to providing bidding assistance and construction administration.
Providing construction administration for these projects assists the contractor during the construction phase if there are design related questions. This, in turn, provides ALDI with a quick project turnaround and a building constructed to the proper specifications.
By providing its customers with quality food at competitively low prices, ALDI will continue to see growth in the U.S. market. ms is proud of the opportunity to assist ALDI in that growth.