The first time Christoph Schwaiger, former CEO of Aldi South, visited Mainland China nearly 13 years ago, his mission was to understand the nature of the consumer market in which he would soon lead the German discount supermarket operator’s launch. 

Schwaiger recalls heading for the wet markets the locals frequented in the morning, suburban supermarkets in the afternoon, and convenience stores at night. 

“I wanted to see what people actually bought, what they walked past, what made them stop, and what I found was nothing short of extraordinary,” he recalled during a presentation to the Food & Beverage Innovation Forum 2026 (FBIF2026) in the southern city of Hangzhou. 

“I had been working in retail back then for about 10 years, and I thought I understood variety. I thought I understood what a well-developed consumer market looked like.”

However, China rewrote Schwaiger’s definition, thanks to the sheer variety of formats competing on a single block, the depth of product ranges, regional specificities, cuisines, ingredients, and preferences that shifted by province and district. 

“There were products I had never seen, categories I did not even have names for. It was genuinely one of the most impressive things I have encountered in this industry in my entire career.”

The pinnacle of his discovery came when he stood in front of the soy sauce section of a supermarket. The generously sized shelf featured so many soy sauce options that he lost count. 

“I thought: ‘Who is this for?’ Not as a criticism, but as a genuine question. I had just spent an afternoon watching real consumers shop, and the ones I watched at the shelf looking for soy sauce were not really excited; they were not exploring; they were standing there a little too long, moving their heads back and forth, reaching for something, then putting it back. The look on their faces was not that of someone who had found exactly what they were looking for. It was more of the look of somebody who wasn’t quite sure why they even came into that store.” 

His point: Variety taken too far ceases to be a service to the customer; rather, it becomes a problem for the customer to solve. Standing in front of that display, watching the shoppers, raised a question he still considers relevant today: In a world where we can offer consumers almost anything, what should we choose to offer customers, and what should we have the discipline to leave out? 

The answer: “It is not about variety. It is about curation.”

Beyond the category review

When supermarket management holds category performance reviews, and the numbers are below budget, the conversation inevitably turns to adding products – by variant, size, format or flavour. 

“It is about responding to what a competitor has launched, a supplier has proposed, or what a trend report has flagged,” he continued. “Sometimes, that is precisely the right answer. New products serve new needs, and range extensions capture new occasions. I am not arguing against product development, but I want to suggest that, as an industry, we have developed very sophisticated sets of tools for measuring the value that those range extensions create, but we have almost no tools for measuring the cost and complexity that come with them. Because every SKU you add to your range is not only a revenue opportunity, it is also a commitment to complexity.”

Brands face a similar challenge as retailers. With every line and every extension comes the question of what that product does for the brand itself. “Does it reinforce what you stand for? Does it genuinely serve a new need, or does it simply respond to the pressure to be present in more spaces, in more places, with the same things? 

The ‘complexity cost’

Schwaiger coins the phrase “the complexity cost”, which he argues operates on three levels simultaneously, adding that none of those costs sits neatly in the profit and loss figures or the spreadsheet.

At an operational level, offering more products means more nodes in the supply chain, more supplier relationships to manage, more quality variables to control, more forecasting complexity – more things that can go wrong between the factory, the field and the consumer’s basket. 

At a commercial level, a consumer standing in front of a category with 40 options is no more satisfied than a consumer standing in front of eight; often, they are even less satisfied.

“When a shelf is too full, the consumer cannot see you; they see the product. They see noise. The trust you have spent years building in that format, in that brand, in that range, that it is reliably good, gets diluted by the volume of decisions you’re asking the consumers to make.” 

The third level, strategy, is the one that people talk about least, he says, but the one he believes matters most. 

“When you add to your range without a governing principle, when the answer to every category gap that you identify is a new SKU, and the answer to every proposal you get and to every trend is yes, you gradually lose the ability to answer a very simple question: What are we? 

“An assortment is not just a commercial decision; it is an identity decision. What you sell to the consumer, your suppliers and your own team, they exactly know who you are and what you stand for. When the assortment loses coherence, when it has grown by accumulation rather than intention, the identity loses coherence too.” 

Curation as a solution

The solution is curation, which he defines as the deliberate act of choosing what to sell and what not to sell, as opposed to range rationalisation, which he describes as a cost exercise undertaken when the business is under pressure, and you need to take complexity out of the system. “Rationalisation is reactive, it is temporary, and it really sticks, because when the pressure adds, things come back, and without the governing principle, you start adding again to your portfolio.

“Curation is different. Curation is a commitment made in advance, held consistently, and defended under pressure about what belongs in your range and what does not. It is active, not reactive. It is a statement about who you are, not just what you currently carry.”

He says curation is built on three factors. Firstly, it builds consumer trust rather than brand awareness or purchase intent. “Trust is what happens when a consumer has repeatedly experienced finding what they expect at the quality they expect, without having to work too hard to get it.” 

Experiences like that do not happen at close range, but rather when the retailer or brand has made enough decisions on behalf of the consumer that the consumer does not have to make as many decisions themselves. 

That ease, convenience, and confidence are the product of someone else’s curation and discipline, someone who has made choices consistently over time so that consumers do not have to.

“When a retailer or a brand curates with conviction, they are not limiting consumers’ choice. They are making the consumer’s choices easier.”

Operational leverage

The second thing that curation builds is operational leverage. If you have fewer SKUs, it means more concentrated buying power, fewer supplier negotiations, deeper relationships, and perhaps even better terms. Most likely, you have faster inventory turns, lower working capital intensity, less shrinkage, fewer write-offs, and, in most cases, a more predictable supply chain performance. 

“Every product you choose not to carry or not to develop is not just a deletion from the range, it is freeing up existing resources that can be reinvested in making the products you do carry and in the margin environment as competitive as that in our industry; that reallocation of resources really matters.”

The third factor he terms identity clarity. “For most retail formats and for our greatest consumer brands, the range is the identity. It is not always the logo, the story, or the marketing campaign. When a consumer describes your brand or your product to a friend who has never tried it. What do they say? They describe what you make. They describe what you stand for, why you reliably deliver on what they need. And that description is your brand in its purest form, and you build it or fail to build it through assortment decisions.” 

The hardest part of curation is not deciding what belongs. Most buyers, category managers, and brand directors have a fair and clear instinct about what belongs and what does not. The tough part is to hold the line under pressure, he continues. 

“When the pressure to add to the range is real, commercially justified and coming from people you trust – an example would be your preferred supplier who has just invested in a new product and you really value the relationship or the category manager that has found a gap and wants to fill it, or the competitor who’s just launched something that is working – the question is, do we need to respond, or do we not respond? 

“All of those pressures are legitimate. The discipline of curation is not to ignore them; it is to evaluate each other against one single question: Does this product make us more of what we are, or less?”

Knowing who you are

Answering that question requires that you know with some precision what you are, and maintaining the answer under quite hard commercial pressure requires something that is genuinely not that common anymore in large organisations: Courage. 

Referring back to his soy sauce example, he asks how many types of soy sauce a customer actually needs, suggesting a range of four or five SKUs, thoughtfully chosen, clearly different, and genuinely useful would suffice. 

“The shelf is not a museum of everything that exists. It’s a recommendation, and the quality of every recommendation is measured by what it leaves out and not by what it includes.”

China, with its regional complexities, is the hardest market to test curation in the world, he says, but a significant opportunity for curation remains. 

When he began building Aldi in China, he recalls adopting conventional wisdom: Localise everything, maximise the range, respond to every regional preference, every seasonal occasion. 

“The market is too diverse. It is too regional, too complex to simplify. More is more, and variety is respect. I understood the argument, and I respect the consumer intelligence behind it. China’s culinary and cultural diversity is real, and any retailer who ignores that will fail.”

When complexity fuels fatigue

But he also believed something – eventually confirmed by consumers – that within that diversity, there was a consumer who was fatigued by complexity, who was spending too much time in the store making decisions they didn’t even want to make, who, if you offered them a carefully chosen, clearly different, reliable but excellent range, smaller than the competition, more focused, and more confident, those consumers would respond; not in spite of the constraint, but because of it. 

“The Chinese consumer is sophisticated, and sophisticated consumers everywhere eventually learn to value curation. We are watching that shift happen in this market right now.

“The formats that are gaining share are not the ones that carry the most, they are the ones that stand for something specific, the ones where the consumer knows before they arrive what kind of experience they are going to have, the ones that have made a clear decision about who they are serving and have the discipline to say no to everything that falls outside of their decision,” he concluded.

• FBIF2026, organised by Simba Events, brought together more than 160 speakers, 650 exhibitors, and 6000+ retail and distribution buyers over three days in Hangzhou. Under the theme ‘Forging Ahead’, the event explored the key variables shaping an industry experiencing a rapidly evolving landscape.