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🌍 Home · 🗺️ Pick your market · 🏪 Find a retailer · 🔎 Find a brand · 💬 Talk to someone who's done it
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Eleven retailers run their own-label in Germany: how a supplier applies, and how German payment law is actually enforced.
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Four German retailers publish a usable route for a new supplier: Kaufland, Aldi Süd, Rossmann and Edeka. Kaufland's is the most detailed of any retailer in this database, with three separate tracks and a dedicated regional-supplier page. Edeka's is regional rather than national: its supplier page names seven regional wholesalers with direct phone and email contacts.
For scale: 4 of 11 here, against 9 of 11 in Great Britain, 1 of 7 in Austria and 0 of 8 in France. Britain is still the easiest of these four markets to approach cold. Germany's advantage is a different one, and it is further down this page: payment law that is actually enforced and published, and a centralised subsidiary inside each of the two big cooperatives.
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From our expert interviews.
Giles Pickles, interviewed August 2026, on how you actually get a German buyer's attention:
A copy of something already on the shelf is the hardest way in. You end up waiting for a tender, either direct from the retailer or through an aggregator such as AMS in Amsterdam, which packages tender offers for retailers across Europe. Leading with innovation works better, because every retailer is competing with the other retailers and wants something the others do not have.
Finding the buyer is not the hard part. There is a senior buyer and a team of junior buyers specialised by category, they are reachable, and they are open, because sourcing is the job. The hard part is being worth their attention. A stand at PLMA reverses the direction and brings them to you.
On timing he was blunt. A private-label project runs six to nine months once you already have the relationship. A new entrant should allow roughly two years from first contact to shelf. He also pointed out that food trends usually run long enough to survive that: matcha took about five years to reach the mainstream and probably has another year or two in it.
On category. Chilled is very difficult in Germany. Shelf lives are short, so retailers need local suppliers, and without production inside the region you cannot compete. Ambient is the realistic route. Frozen works if you can master the cold chain, where two-year shelf lives line up with ambient anyway. Cold cuts and foreign cheese are places where German own label is already strong enough that shoppers do not trade up to the brand.
On organic. Germany does not ladder organic the way some European markets do. Organic is a standard section in every store, from produce through butter and milk, and own label undercuts the branded organic. But there is no entry-versus-premium organic split to design a range around.
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Every retailer here sells imported product. The question is never whether they import. It is whether they will contract with you directly, or expect you to arrive through an importer.
Published route for overseas suppliers records one narrow thing: whether the retailer publishes a supplier route aimed at suppliers based outside Germany. That is a fact about their website, not a statement about what they buy or where from. The Direct or via importer column is the one that answers the real question.
No retailer publishes that answer, so this column is expert testimony rather than a citation. For Germany it was filled by Giles Pickles in September 2026: the four largest groups contract direct with overseas manufacturers and prefer to, and the smaller five are open to it. His reasoning is in the panel above.
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Grouped by the tier each brand occupies: value, core, premium, and the specialist ranges built around a single need state. Find the tier you would be pitching into, and the brands listed are what you would be competing against for the shelf.