Aldi 

Our role

Cavendish has worked with Aldi for more than fifteen years to support the delivery of new stores across Great Britain through integrated planning communications and stakeholder engagement. 

We developed a national ‘Planning Communications Playbook’ for Aldi, creating a consistent but locally adaptable approach to consultation, supporter mobilisation and engagement with communities and decision makers. 

Our work combines in-person consultation, digital engagement, political stakeholder management and supporter mobilisation campaigns designed to broaden participation, strengthen local support and communicate the economic and community benefits associated with new stores. 

As planning environments increasingly shift online and politics becomes more complex, we continue to evolve Aldi’s engagement approach through digital consultation strategies, social media engagement and data-led supporter mobilisation. 

The challenge

As planning and development environments become more politically and socially contested, major retail developments face growing scrutiny around traffic, town centres, local impact and competition within communities. 

For Aldi, sustaining rapid national expansion depended not simply on identifying viable sites, but on consistently building community and political support across a fragmented local stakeholder environment shaped by community sentiment, local politics and increasingly digital forms of opposition and mobilisation. 

The business needed a scalable engagement model capable of strengthening local legitimacy, reducing planning risk and supporting delivery across hundreds of proposed developments nationwide.