You I would believe over random Reddit dude
zing!
Oh no zing, I’m being serious!
I believe @linguafood’s palate too.
Just not the dude who normally eats Classico and folds when someone tells him the Aldi sauce it’s Victoria not Raos 
(Meanwhile, when I get to the Aldi’s diagonally across town for me I’ll have a sturdy shopping list)
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I read a blog post a while back by someone claiming to be a sommelier who said they eat a lot of Roa’s and identified the Aldi as Rao’s, or very close.
I tend to agree with your theory that the price difference indicates something in the ingredients list is significantly different.
Bingo.
They may taste the same, but the quality of ingredients may not be.
I can make a hamburger at home that tastes like a Big Mac, but I will guarantee you the ingredients will be better than the ones McDonalds uses.
It’s probably the same reddit guy (he said he’s a somm)
And yet, what I was thinking even as I wrote that, was that if the flavor is substantially similar at the cheaper ingredients price point, maybe it should debunk the hoopla around only X type of tomatoes and Y type of olive oil being the “best”.
(Many years ago I had a random collection of jarred pasta sauces to use up, and a stint in the pressure cooker plus half a stick of butter rendered them all about the same level of faux-Marcella delicious 
)
I absolutely agree that good ingredients make good end results.
BUT from the manufacturing wonk, assuming that your high-priced container of anything contains only the best ingredients by default would be a really big assumption.
Some manufacturers are just maximising profit by creating buzz. Some roll high end brands off thr exact same line as the cheap stuff.
Caveat emptor. Always.
(But there’s 4 jars of Rao’s in my pantry. Cause it’s really that much better.)
Yet vodka has a wide range of prices without substantive differences. They’re selling the name, not the better contents.
Sometimes better raw ingredients and more processing, such as extra filtration. It can’t be that all folk are simply too dumb to notice they are identical. Let’s give people a little more credit.
In Los Angeles, Aldi’s has the best turkey price in town. Honeysuckle White, 59 cents a pound, no minimum grocery purchase to get that price. Is it the best turkey in town? Probably not. But when you thaw it, do a dry brine and then roast it with wine and butter? Pretty darn good!
Plus they had Ocean Spray cranberries fresh, for 99 cents a 12 oz bag! I got four as I know I will be baking at least two Laurie Colwin Nantucket cranberry pies in the next two weeks, and then I can freeze the rest of the berries. (Dang. Now I am thinking I should have gotten more for the freezer!)
I need the equivalent of 7 12-ounce bags each year for cranberry relish (Thanksgiving, New Year’s Eve, Passover, summer BBQ, Rosh Hashonah, Yom Kippur break-fast, book club pot luck). I used to buy large bags at Costco, but a couple of years ago they stopped carrying them, and even the supermarkets didn’t have them.I was reduced to buying them frozen in the Eastern European market at twice the price. It’s good to see them back again.
I’d be interested in knowing what your cranberry relish recipe is. I just use the one from Ocean Spray, the one with the whole orange chopped in it. So good on bread with cream cheese 
Boil 12 ounces cranberries in a cup of water until they pop. Add a package of sugar-free Jello (raspberry or cherry), a drained 20-ounce can of crushed pineapple, a drained 12-ounce can of mandarin orange pieces, and 1/2 cup walnuts (optional if someone is allergic). Chill.
Kind of like a Tombstone, IMHO. Meh.
I love their produce and Berman’s mayo. Only Chinese garlic, though. WTF?! Their pub style pretzels, the wife loves.
NAY on yet another Aldi pizza, the Mama Cozzi’s tavern-style 3-cheese. Don’t remember right now who recommended it, but … I think we’ll stick to homemade pizza or TJ’s, which has been more reliable on that count.
The crust never got crispy (yeah, I know the pic looks great), and it had a decided cardboard quality to it. Plenty of cheese, for sure, and I added sautéed shrooms, green pepper & onion. But the crust is a definite no.
That is so weird. Have you calibrated your oven? The crust was very very crispy here. If the top is that brown you’d think the crust would be plenty done. 
You do the full preheat and cook from frozen? Do you have a convection setting you could try?
I am almost too cheap to buy a jar of each to compare. But I do love a blind taste test. Maybe I will recruit my hubs to help.
A pizza stone heated at 400 for about an hour, which usually suffices (I mean, 800 would be ideal 
) and has produced more favorable = crispier crusts. It came out soft & even trying to crisp it up in a pan didn’t help. Maybe I bought a lemon 
