How do Lidl and Aldi get away with their imitation brands? We unpick the Cuthbert & Colin caterpillar wars.
‘I spent my first 18 months there firefighting,’ remembers Paul Stainton. ‘They were trying to stop us in our tracks.’ After responding to an advert in the local paper, Stainton got a job as a buyer at Aldi in 1989 – a year before the supermarket opened its first store in the UK. When Aldi’s super-low prices started making headlines, the British supermarket establishment threw a hissy fit. ‘The likes of Tesco and Sainsbury’s were going to our suppliers and threatening them,’ Stainton says. ‘They were basically saying: “If you carry on supplying Aldi, then we’ll delist your products.”’
The Tony Soprano schtick eventually stopped working, and four years later, another German-owned supermarket – Lidl – joined Aldi in the UK. In a field of British competitors, there was an air of exoticism and suspicion surrounding them. And they weren’t just foreign, but German, so rumours quickly began to swirl that Aldi and Lidl were the same company, shadily trading under slightly different names to circumvent rules about how many branches of the same supermarket were allowed in different areas. Or that they were owned by a pair of brothers who had fallen out and become bitter rivals.
As a young man fresh out of a graduate scheme, Stainton says that working at Aldi initially felt like a start-up, where no two days, or hours, were the same. ‘I remember doing quite an in-depth negotiation on baked beans with our supplier,’ Stainton says. ‘The next conversation was with a TV supplier. I literally put the phone down after talking about thousands of cans of baked beans, then started talking about 14-inch TVs. Remember 14-inch TVs?’
Much like the size of our TV screens, Aldi and Lidl have since grown hugely. As industry disruptors, part of their success has been creating their own versions of existing products, which have been shamelessly designed to look and taste like their branded counterparts. Back in 2008, about three or four recessions ago, Aldi first had a spike in sales when the credit crunch hit. To capitalise on this, Stainton remembers that one of their main goals was to make the German-owned business ‘feel’ like a British supermarket. They also expanded their product offering, to allow British shoppers to do ‘the big shop’ there, rather than popping in ‘for a few bits and bobs’.
Own-brand products that were purposefully designed to be familiar were central to this plan. ‘If you take tomato ketchup, for example. Aldi would make as much effort to make their one taste as good as Heinz,’ Stainton says. ‘To help their customer understand that the product was an equivalent, they would take cues from the Heinz packaging and do something similar.’ Aldi began heavily promoting these products in ad campaigns, such as 2012’s ‘Like brands, only cheaper’. In these ads, shoppers would choose between market leaders like PG Tips tea and the own-brand alternative. ‘It really worked,’ Stainton remembers, ‘because we all love a bargain.’
Alex Bee, product director at Space Doctors – a branding agency that works with Ocado and Tesco – tells me that she has recently seen an uptick in client briefs seeking imitations of existing products. ‘Brands have always copied other brands, but the biggest thing that’s changed is cultural attitudes towards value-range products,’ she says. Britain’s national obsession with classist microaggressions appears to be shifting – when it comes to food, at least. ‘People are choosing own-label products because they are no longer perceived as low-quality,’ Bee says. ‘Now, culturally, the perception is that it’s actually quite smart, bordering on smug.’
Aldi’s ‘middle aisle’ – a place where everything from air fryers to hiking gear can be snapped up – has been part of breaking down this stigma. Stainton remembers that the concept originated in their German stores as a way of using products like DIY materials to get ‘different types’ of customers (translation: men) into their stores. In the UK, there were two lightning-rod moments: first, when ski-wear appeared in the middle aisle, luring in the middle classes with the promise of Alpine-appropriate gear at a fraction of the price. Then there was an inflatable hot tub, which is still one of the most expensive items they have ever sold. ‘It was about 300 quid,’ Stainton says. ‘But it got loads of PR because it was so unusual and eccentric. Everyone was talking about it.’
Brands who find themselves being imitated by Aldi or Lidl have every reason to feel pissed off about it, but these dupes have a symbiotic relationship with the brands they’re imitating. It might seem like customers are rejecting them, but they’re only choosing these copycat versions because they feel like the original. To be copied by Aldi or Lidl is to be a victim of your own success. But what happens when brands don’t see imitation as a form of flattery?
In 2021, Marks & Spencer announced a lawsuit against Aldi in a dispute over a caterpillar cake. They claimed that Aldi’s ‘Cuthbert’ cake was too similar to their iconic ‘Colin’ cake, which is a staple of birthday parties and rain-hampered ‘picky bits’ picnics. Daniel Fletcher, a senior associate at Forbes Solicitors specialising in intellectual property and copyright law, tells me that the official name for this process is ‘benchmarking’ – where brands imitate the traits of a market-leading product. He says that it’s not really possible to trademark recipes, but it’s much easier to mount a legal challenge over design similarities. Even so, legal claims are still relatively rare, because, Fletcher says, newer ‘challenger brands’ live in fear that their products will be removed from the shelves as retribution.
As a legacy brand founded in 1884, M&S isn’t scared of Aldi. The case of Colin versus Cuthbert was largely based on the claim that people associate Colin the Caterpillar strongly with M&S. The trouble, Fletcher says, was that there are actually a lot of caterpillar cakes on the market, so the case was settled out of court and both cakes are still on sale. M&S came back swinging, however, when they challenged Aldi about a festive gin bottle. The standout feature was that the gin bottle lit up inside – a feature that M&S had a ‘registered design’ over. This time they won the case, and it was ruled that Aldi’s version amounted to infringement.
Fletcher says that benchmarking is ‘being highlighted a lot more now’, because of how much Aldi and Lidl have grown. Both supermarkets are no longer plucky underdogs – but they do a good job of obscuring that. ‘Aldi have been trying to get humour and self-deprecation into their ads,’ Stainton says. ‘Yes, they’re a multi-billion-pound German-owned business, but they can try to hide that by sounding more normal.’
Despite being international companies, Bee thinks that Aldi and Lidl have succeeded by ‘zoning in’ how customers in specific regions are talking – and laughing – about their products. Aldi has leaned into the chaos of the middle aisle, which has become something of a national in-joke in the UK. And own-brand fakes are surely one of the longest-running jokes that these supermarkets share with their customers. There is something nudge-nudge wink-wink about how they push similarities right to the line, and sometimes over it, all in the name of value. Since Stainton left Aldi in 2020, he says that they are stocking more branded products than ever – either to give customers more choice, or to really drive home how much cheaper their own-branded products are by comparison. As for Lidl, it is standing out by doing themed weeks – Greek week, Italian week, German week and more – each with a premium offering of cuisine that you can’t get at other supermarkets.
Despite their individual quirks, Fletcher thinks that benchmarking will continue to be a core strategy for both supermarkets, especially after a 2024 dispute between Thatchers cider and Aldi’s own-brand equivalent ‘added fuel to the fire’ when, this time, the supermarket emerged victorious.
Still, no matter how many brazen copies these retailers create, everyone who shops there has a list of products that they wouldn’t dream of swapping out (for me, Hellmann’s mayonnaise). Bee ascribes this to loyalty over taste. ‘Those brands have done a really good job of connecting with how people feel when they eat them,’ she says, ‘whether you feel comforted, or remember a specific memory from when you were a kid.’ And therein lies the only way our brands can keep copycats at bay: become inimitable. Become iconic.
