Aldi takes over from Bennet in Viale Monza in Milan: what does it mean?

Drafted 7 January 2024, updated 21 May 2025. Above an advertisement for Aldi in Milan, the discount chain has encircled the city.

What is happening in distribution, among the discounters and supermarkets in Milan, the richest square in Italy?

I took the cue from this article to take a step back and recall what I wrote in ‘Le Ossa dei Caprotti’ :

One thing that irritates him [my father Bernardo] very much is that, with the invaluable help of Marino Fineschi, I finally came up with a format for the smaller supermarkets, the Esselunga Sottocasa.

These are already existing outlets, smaller in size, which we are adapting to a new social context, characterised by the increase in singles and pensioners. Nicola Piepoli, who started working with us at Bernardo’s suggestion, is a great supporter of the project. He himself does not drive and does not own a car: he realised that these increasingly numerous categories of customers are not inclined to travel too far to go shopping and do not need to leave the supermarket with overflowing trolleys. They prefer speed, with shops as close to home as possible.

I say to my father: ‘Look, 30 per cent of people in Milan don’t have cars and the population is getting older’. Or: ‘We should calculate better the catchment areas, the type of population, its needs’.

I warn him that we can’t set up in Volterra, a town of 10,000 inhabitants, with a giant superstore, the kind he likes and that satisfies his failed architect aspirations. He calculates that we could build 83 Esselunga Sottocasa, renovating existing Esselunga supermarkets, with areas of up to 1,500 square metres, such as the supermarket in Viale Piave in Milan or the Esselunga in Via Pisana in Florence. We would do this by greatly anticipating the plans that competitors would put into practice in the following years and that Esselunga would find itself chasing long afterwards.

It will not be until the end of 2019 that the company, now controlled by my sister Marina and my mother Giuliana, will open its first minimarket, in Corso Italia, Milan. It will be called ‘LaEsse’, initially renouncing the Esselunga brand that my father in his day had asked to always put on every initiative. In a little over a year, the ‘LaEsse’ shops will rise to six, five in Milan and one in Rome.

I won’t go into the merits of the formula chosen by Marina or those who work with her, which is profoundly different from the one I proposed so many years ago and which can still be seen in some shops, in Tuscany or Milan, today. I only note that perhaps Marina had to fill a void in the company’s territorial presence, left by Bernardo’s decision to abandon the Esselunga Sottocasa project. It seems to me that a lot of time was lost, and that’s a shame.

Instead, Bernardo, after he gets me out of the way, will only make superstores, in his own way, without any feedback on the catchment areas and demographic profile of the area. On the other hand, my father has all the plants in Milan designed for food production, fresh pasta, ice cream, ready meals, without ever drawing up an industrial plan… .

… Yet in the development done exclusively with superstores, without giving a push to e-commerce – which he detests – and without bothering to open additional smaller supermarkets, he will end up leaving a significant part of the city of Milan, the heart of his market, to the competition.

I also showed him the profit and loss account of our most profitable shop, which had 1500 square metres of floor space.

In vain.

“Le Ossa dei Caprotti” on pages 244 and 245