Australian Tom Daunt promoted to global boss of Aldi Sud
Country boy and once promising Australian rules footballer Tom Daunt has been appointed the new boss of global supermarkets giant Aldi, making him the first Australian to hold the role.
Tom Daunt, the local boss of German supermarket chain Aldi, will take on the top job managing the retail giant’s global operations spanning Australia, North America, Europe and Asia.
Mr Daunt, a once promising Australian rules football player, will take over as the boss of Aldi South from May 1, which makes up half the Aldi global empire owned by the highly secretive Albrecht family.
It hands him responsibility for tens of billions of dollars in supermarket revenue from Australia, China, the US, Britain, Ireland, Slovenia, Hungary, Germany, Belgium and other parts of Europe including more than 120,000 employees.
Mr Daunt was appointed the boss of Aldi in Australia in 2015 and has grown the local German discount chain rapidly to be a third force in the local $100bn supermarket sector with market share of around 15 per cent and quickly growing its store base to more than 500 stores.
It is the first time an Australian has been placed in charge of one of the Albrecht family’s Aldi global operations, the competing South or North arms, and is a huge elevation for the local Australian Aldi boss who will now move with some of his family to Austria where Aldi South has its holding company based.
Mr Daunt joined Aldi in 1998 at the age of 25 and spent more than five years in the UK – first as an area manager and then as store operations director, running more than 60 outlets. He came back to Australia in 2004, setting up the Queensland business, and became MD for Aldi Australia eight years ago. In April 2015, he was named as CEO, Aldi Australia.
He studied logistics – rather than retail – at Victoria University and has a Master of Business from the University of Queensland.
He began working in logistics in the UK, and then migrated to store operations and merchandising as he rose through the Aldi ranks.
Aldi is considered to be among the top five biggest supermarket and grocery chain in the world with its Aldi South arm posting annual sales of more than $123bn, easily eclipsing the combined sales of Australia’s heavyweight supermarkets Woolworths and Coles.
Mr Daunt will have oversight of almost 7200 stores, including his Australian portfolio of 582 shops, with the bulk of those international stores in Germany, the USA and Britain.
As part of his promotion to the global role at Aldi South, also known as Aldi Sud, Mr Daunt will join the supermarket giant’s executive board and co-lead with current Aldi South chairman Thomas Ziegler.
Anna McGrath and Marietta Schorn will co-lead the Aldi Australia business in the years ahead.
Ms McGrath is a 17-year veteran of Aldi Australia and has held various senior positions, including serving as group managing director in both its US and Australian businesses over the last five years.
Ms Schorn is currently serving as group managing director in its Austrian business, and will relocate to Australia to join Ms McGrath in leading that business.
The founding Albrecht family split the Aldi empire in the early 1960s over a fight over the sale of cigarettes, with one brother, Karl, believing the sale of tobacco would attract shoplifters and he formed his Aldi South division.
Aldi was seen as rather quirky when it first arrived in Australia in 2001. Australian shoppers didn’t quite know what to make of its strange and unknown chocolate brands, groceries stacked on pallets, and check-outs where staff rushed through groceries at lightning speed, forcing customers to pack their own bags at a manic pace.
Aldi charged money for its reusable bags from day one, almost two decades before Woolworths and Coles had to deal with the plastic bags saga this year.
Even Mr Daunt admitted that Aldi was initially viewed as kind of weird. Or worse, “cheap and nasty”.
“Originally, we started out … and we’re perceived as really unusual and very discount. Why would you go there?” he said.
“It’s cheap, it must be nasty. And that phrase with Australians rolls off the tongue, cheap and nasty. There’s a period where people have to come to understand that because it costs less, it doesn’t mean you trade quality. That’s the uniqueness of our business model,” Mr Daunt told The Australian in 2018.
A promising AFL footballer in his youth, towering at 198cm, Daunt still bears the scars of that sports journey, which ended when he snapped his anterior cruciate ligament. He has had 14 knee operations and seven years ago had a knee replacement. It’s no surprise, then, that his sporting passion now revolves around the golf course, where he has a competitive handicap of 10.5.
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