Discontinued Summer Aldi Items We Wish Would Return To Shelves

There are many reasons why Aldi's stalwart fanbase remains loyal to this grocery store brand with German roots. Aldi is famed for its low prices and high-quality off-brand products that are often compared to pricier items that you might find at other stores or your favorite fast food chain. Aldi receives high praise from gluten-intolerant customers on the hunt for more gluten-free options. Aldi is also known for offering a plethora of seasonal items that fans patiently wait to return every year.

That said, though, even the most loyal Aldi fan can admit the brand has one glaring fault: It's all too common for grocery shoppers' favorite Aldi products to disappear from store shelves suddenly and without warning (unless you know to look for the tell-tale sign on the store labels). With that in mind, we've compiled some of our favorite discontinued summer Aldi items — if we could only get our hands on them.

What's more summery than s'mores? Whether you're lucky enough to be roasting your marshmallows over an open flame in the backyard or the woods, or you're huddled around your grill grates trying to achieve that perfect toasty hue, s'mores are a summertime staple.

In both 2019 and 2020, Aldi offered a s'mores jumbo cookie kit that combined all the fantastic flavors of s'mores with a more convenient medium: baking. The kit came with a cookie crust, chocolate, marshmallows, and even its own pan for easier prep. The kit served 16 hungry campers and came in at under $5, but the last time it was available, in late June 2020, it was only on store shelves for a mere seven days before it disappeared. Now, the s'mores cookie kit is nowhere to be found — but that doesn't mean you can't find other cookie kits at Aldi. Keep an eye out and you'll see similar cookie kits on shelves for certain holidays and seasons, like the Mother's Day Giant Cookie Kit that was likewise available for only a limited time and cost just a few dollars.

Cheese and alcohol — whether you prefer a wine and a charcuterie board or beer and some beer cheese with pretzels — are a natural pairing. However, typically, the alcohol is served alongside the cheese ... until Aldi introduced us to its cocktail-inspired summer cheeses, that is.

In the summer of 2021, Aldi released a limited-time Emporium cheese collection that included three cocktail-inspired flavors: Piña Colada, Peach Bellini, and Espresso Martini. Each of the three flavors included a Wensleydale base. If you're not familiar with your more niche cheese varieties, Wensleydale is a United Kingdom-derived, semi-hard cheese made with cow's and sheep's milk that dates back to the 12th century. To this base, Aldi added extra ingredients to achieve those cocktail-inspired flavors, such as peaches and pineapples for the Piña Colada flavor, more peaches for the Peach Bellini flavor, and coffee beans and chocolate for the Espresso Martini flavor. Alas, this summertime offering was discontinued by Aldi for 2022 and 2023.

In the summer of 2020, Aldi introduced a new line of sangria, just in time for summer snacking. Available at under $5 a bottle, the collection featured both a traditional red sangria and a white sangria, but then also a grapefruit rose that's not quite sangria but was still included regardless. At the time of the release, Aldi sommelier partner Sarah Tracey told Food Network that the options paired perfectly with summertime activities that arose while the world was still very much in the early throes of the COVID-19 pandemic and subsequent lockdowns. Think sourdough bread baking and jigsaw puzzling.

This summertime release was hardly Aldi's first foray into all things sangria, though. The brand also offered a boxed sangria for a while, which received rave reviews on Instagram in 2021, with commenters saying that the affordable boxed sangria was perfect when upgraded with a little chilled fruit and entirely worth stocking up on.

A summertime favorite to more recently hit the Aldi chopping block? The store's Specially Selected Chocolate Peanut Butter Ice Cream, which Aldi's Twitter account confirmed was discontinued in June 2023. Aldi frequently receives high marks for its ice cream offerings, and the Specially Selected Chocolate Peanut Butter Ice Cream was no exception. One fan said, "If Aldi gets rid of the chocolate peanut butter ice cream ... I will fall into a despair so deep I will likely never recover," and Aldi replied to the Twitter comment that it was discontinued. On Reddit, similarly enthusiastic fans compared the ice cream to favorite flavors from Häagen-Dazs, and noted that they simply could not have this Aldi ice cream in the house, unless they wanted to eat the entire container.

Luckily, for fans missing their chocolate peanut butter ice cream this summer, Aldi does have other frozen offerings to (potentially) make up for it. Currently available, the Aldi Sundae Shoppe Gelato is a fan favorite with flavors such as caramel cookie crunch, mixed berry, and triple chocolate.

You may feel like you see hard seltzers everywhere these days. The beer aisle is filled with multiple options of brightly colored cans of seltzer boasting big flavors for fewer calories than what you might get in a beer. Many restaurants now offer hard seltzers on their beer lists, and it's not difficult to find breweries producing their own in-house hard seltzers. However, while hard seltzer may seem like it's everywhere,  according to research by Drizly (via Bloomberg), the hard seltzer market has leveled off, with ready-to-drink cocktails in cans growing in popularity in seltzers' place.

Maybe Aldi made a smart move when it pulled its Vista Bay Margarita Hard Seltzers from store shelves in 2023. Aldi confirmed the hard seltzers were discontinued on Twitter in April. The seltzers looked extremely similar to offerings from competitor brand White Claw and featured similar flavors, too, including cherry, raspberry, grapefruit, and lime.

Aldi has removed multiple summer-ready alcoholic beverages from its shelves. Hop Lift IPA was once a favorite beer at Aldi. The 6.2% ABV, 60 IBU American IPA was made with 600 pounds of hops per tank and, despite being a budget-friendly, store-brand beer, was well-reviewed by beer lovers.

Unfortunately, while the beer may be fondly remembered, it was discontinued by Aldi sometime around 2019, according to a Reddit poster. Luckily, however, there is a workaround, as the same Reddit user explained. It turns out that this beer isn't an exclusive Aldi store-branded brew. You can still find it offered by the original maker, Third Street Brewhouse, which is based in Cold Spring, Minnesota. If this was one of your favorite Aldi products, then, you might just need to plan a little road trip (and maybe try a few of Third Street Brewhouse's other beers while you're in the area).

Many shoppers following specialty diets rely on Aldi for carrying staples that they might not be able to find for an affordable price elsewhere — such as the vegan-friendly Earth Grown Organic Plant-Based Meatless Burgers that you could find at Aldi in 2019. However, those who loved the meatless burgers would soon be disappointed when they were discontinued.  Beforehand, fans had praised the burgers on A Billion, noting they were "so close to actual meat consistency" and saying "I love that this option is organic, as most of Aldi's veggie burgers are not."

Even though this burger won't be making its way to your next summertime barbecue, Aldi does have a few other vegan burger options to tempt your taste buds, also from the same Earth Grown brand. Try out the Earth Grown Southwestern Style Black Bean Chipotle Burger or the Earth Grown Veggie Burger (made with 11 veggies). Earth Grown even sells kale-based and quinoa-based vegan burgers at Aldi.

These burgers may not be vegan, but they were a certain summertime favorite at Aldi locations in the United Kingdom — at least for a brief time until they were discontinued in 2020. The offering from Mae's Kitchen was a vegetarian burger made with beans, veggies, and cheese, plus a kick of nacho spice. When the burgers were discontinued by Aldi, multiple users voiced their complaints on Twitter. Unfortunately, all the brand had to say was, "All of our products are under constant review ... and changes are made for various reasons."

If you really want to make some mouthwatering nacho-inspired cheese "burgers" at home this summer, take a page out of Guy Fieri's book and follow his advice for the perfect vegan cheeseburger. The Mayor of Flavor Town blends grains like rice and quinoa with veggies such as mushrooms and peppers, along with bread crumbs, to form a patty. Then, he tops his cooked burger with a cashew-based cheese sauce.

As any Aldi fan knows, it's not just food that Aldi stocks on its shelves. The brand also offers a small selection of home goods, including seasonal items ready for summer. Up until 2022, one of those summer items that you could find on Aldi shelves in the United Kingdom was the Barbecue Days Disposable Barbecue.

If you've never used a disposable barbecue before, the concept is simple. For those who don't have access to a home grill or portable grill like what you would use while camping, a disposable grill acts as a stand-in. A disposable metal rectangle holds easy-light charcoal that will burn for over an hour, long enough to cook food for several people. However, despite the convenience, Aldi said in a press release that discontinuing the barbecues was a smart decision intended to help prevent forest fires and reduce waste. When you look at Aldi's track record as a sustainable brand, the move isn't surprising — but sometimes one does wish for the extra portability and ease of a disposable barbecue.