Aldi is making its biggest play for the hearts and wallets of Middle England by hiring a celebrity chef for an unprecedented £10 million television advertising campaign.

Phil Vickery, who regularly appears on BBC One's Ready, Steady, Cook, has signed an initial two-year deal to promote recipes centred on products bought from the German-owned discount store.

The move marks the latest effort by Aldi to attract more customers from its rivals by emphasising the quality of its products, as well as its low prices. It claims to have won nearly a million extra customers during the credit crunch as shoppers trade down from the likes of Tesco, J Sainsbury and Waitrose.

On Tuesday it emerged that Marks & Spencer was changing its food advertising for the first time in three years and was hiring Sir David Jason, the actor best known for playing Del in Only Fools and Horses, in an effort to boost sales of its ready meals among a “wider audience”.

Under the deal with Aldi, Mr Vickery, a Michelin-starred chef, will work on developing products as well as championing the business. His first advert, featuring frozen sea bass, will be screened on September 15. His fee is thought to be significantly less than the £1 million a year paid by Sainsbury's to Jamie Oliver.

Paul Foley, Aldi's managing director, told The Times: “We like surprising people. We are a business that has been steadily growing over the past three years and we are getting a better reputation for quality.

“In the taste tests we do we are right up there with the likes of M&S and Waitrose. Most of our new customers in the past two or three years have been ABC1 and there has been a particular spike in the past three months. This is not a celebrity chef endorsement, like Jamie Oliver and J Sainsbury. It's a partnership built on values we both believe in.”

Aldi, which was renowned for its secrecy before the credit crunch hit the high street, approached Mr Vickery this year. He said: “I was sceptical when Aldi approached me. I wanted to see how staff are treated, where the food came from, why Aldi were so cheap, did they turn their suppliers over.

“Once you put your name to something, if it goes wrong then it's not the company that gets it, it's me. I had a good meeting with Paul and that was that. Everyone thinks there's a catch because of Aldi's prices, but the quality is good.”

Aldi, which has 430 stores across the UK, claims that it is up to 20 per cent cheaper than its rivals because its distribution system is far smaller and more efficient. It stocks only 1,000 lines, compared with the 40,000 on offer in a more typical store, and sells a limited range - only one type of shampoo, for example - but it is the large volumes that mean that Aldi can sell at low prices.

The business is putting far more emphasis on fresh and chilled food and has introduced a Specially Selected premium range to try to win more business. Industry figures last month showed that Aldi's market share had grown by 37 per cent in the past year to 2.2 per cent.

Mr Foley wants to open a store a week until Aldi reaches 1,500 outlets. He said: “People at the very top end who don't cook for themselves are not in my target market and there are people at the bottom who do not care about quality. Everyone in between is fair game for us and that's who we're going after. We're about quality at low prices.”

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