The Trader Joe's Product Discussion Thread (S/D)

How is the TJs podcast?

fridge tamales >> frozen tamales

there are TOO MANY frozen pizzas!! Is there any consensus on which ones are the best and worst?

None are the best, most are terrible. The roasted veggie one is just OK.

I like the flatbread ones more.

It actually kind of strange that the frozen pizzas there are not that great.

are any frozen pizzas actually great?

I love certain digiornos varieties, in particular their pizzeria styles.

I like digiornos too.And I feel like in other non US countries the frozen pizzas in the chain supermarkets (monoprix, sainsbury etc.) are pretty tasty.

the bakery where i worked in high school used to have amazing frozen pizzas. they were more like tomato pies with sicilian crusts

oh wow, i just looked online and the source for those pizzas (the bakery owned by the dad of my boss) is now the brooklyn club alphaville

Not TJ's but this gluten-free pizza is preeeetty good, although I add sliced tomatoes, some salt, more parmesan. But the crust and sauce and cheese are DECENT which is saying something.

http://againstthegraingourmet.com/assets/images/products/box-pesto-pizza.png

the problem with the TJs pizzas is their crusts are the hardest crusts of any pizza on the planet. I have the roasted veggie one occasionally, it's reasonably healthy-seeming at least. health aside I'd rather eat any other frozen pizzas.

hot take: the only good frozen pizzas are the bottom-of-the-barrel ones, they're an entirely separate entity from "actual" pizza and attempts to be what they are not end up disappointing

Pretty sure that after college I was 15% tombstone pizza and I admit that brand and Red Baron are still the only frozen pizzas I have weird nostalgia for.

I used to get the wild mushroom and truffle or burrata, prosciutto flatbread and the tart with ham and maybe emmental? flatbread thing a lot from TJ. Right next to the frozen pizzas and so much better. Probably because like mentioned above it's not the rock hard pizza crust.

I think tj's pesto pizza is solid, and I find most frozen pizzas inedible

against the grain's stuff is ok but they use so much cheese as a binding agent that it can be a bit much (esp if you put cheese on the pizza)

i like schar's pizza crusts ok

oh there's a gluten free stuff thread

the gluten (wheat ) free diet

I love that ham and mushroom (?) flat bread too

I also like the ones they have there that are made in Italy, they have 4-5 types.

i was made of pizza -- mostly cheap $1 frozen pizzas -- for several years in my early 20s.
i also worked at a pizza restaurant and could pile a slice with whatever I wanted for $1 after my shift and i did that to splurge :-/
how i survived is anyone's guess

TJ's pizzas are definitely trash (at least the cheap ones).

When I was at my most overweight and unhealthy in my mid-20s, Tombstone was definitely a big factor. Can't remember the last time I've had one but the thought does give me a tiny pang of nostalgia.

oh hey wow this jackfruit curry is fab

haven't really been wowed by jackfruit in things. something abt the texture bothers me. i did like the fzn pad thai though a fair bit.

The local TJs did a promo where they ostensibly offered that jackfruit curry, deconstructed, at the aisle end, with canned jackfruit and canned green curry simmering sauce. It wasn't as good. In particular, one has slice all the jackfruit tendrils/kernels off the backbone/cob before its edible.

The new vegan green tea mochi are a huge disappointment

They had some vegan mochi like ten years ago, three different flavors, they were amazing. These taste like nothing.

I wasn't able to find the jackfruit curry. Could it be a regional item?

It disappeared from the local TJs 3 months ago. In the one year TJs has been local, they've stopped stocking about 5 items I liked/loved, and have become a less attractive errand for this vegan (pour one out for the bollywood popcorn and veggie chili, too). If they discontinue the whole wheat lavash and zhoug, I might not bother.

Still waiting for the chili mango fruit floes there come back.

I just picked up a can of vegetarian chili, don't know if it's the same one. But yeah, they'll drop even a popular item if their buyers can't get it at a good price.

okay, one opened near me, and i'm pumped. i got the pulled pork today

i am pretty sure i saw a jackfruit curry thing- this was in mpls though

Trader Joe's mystery I'm hoping to solve: Every once in a while I pop into the local store and there are several people in line paying for single bananas with their Link/Snap cards. That's it, just a single banana each. At first I thought that maybe they were getting cash back, but I don't think you can do that with a Link card. Though Occam's Razor would say it's just a bunch of people waiting in line to buy single bananas with their Link cards, I've still been trying to figure it out.

As an aside, via my diligent research I did learn (as revealed in I guess the first episode of the TJs podcast) why they even sell single bananas (for 19 cents each) in the first place:

Most grocery stores sell bananas by weight, and if you need just one or two bananas, you take off as many as you want and weigh them. In the first episode of Inside Trader Joe's, CEO Dan Bane said Trader Joe's used to sell bananas by the pound, too. But they didn't have scales in stores, so the bananas were weighed and packaged before being put on display. That meant the bananas were offered in bags of four or five, and if you just wanted one or two, you couldn't open them up and take out the ones you wanted.

Then one day Bane was at a Trader Joe's in Sun City, California, which is near a retirement center. He saw an older woman buying fruit, but she bypassed the banana bags.

"So I asked her, 'Ma'am, if you don't mind me asking, I saw you looking at the bananas but you didn't put anything in your cart,'" Bane said. "And she says to me, 'Sonny, I may not live to that fourth banana.'"

Bane said they decided the very next day that Trader Joe's had to sell individual bananas. They priced them at 19 cents apiece, and they've been priced like that for the past 13 years.

That lady did us all a favor, too! No one wants to buy too many bananas. That'd be like buying too many avocados. With the way bananas ripen, if you buy too many, some of them will definitely be overripe by the time you get to them.

IDK the answer, but I’ll buy max 4 bananas at a time.

I just used one of TJ's faux asian face masks. It was fine.

a few months ago they brought back the raspberry macaron cake, not sure if it's seasonal or not but I'M SO HAPPY

the corn bread crisps are really good as long as you don't look at the nutritional info/serving size

The vegetable antipasto (artichoke hearts, mushrooms, eggplant, tomatoes, oven-dried and marinated in EVOO w/ rosemary) in the grocery section is a good appetizer and a pretty good deal.

the gluten-free beet crackers are pretty good

...but it also sounds like a McSweeney’s parody of a trader joe’s product

:D

lol yes

for sure

For an honest opinion of the "gluten free" fad, ask someone with celiac disease. Restaurant servers assume they're food hipsters.

i like those beet crackers. We ate a box with hummus.

They now have raclette. and some newish semi-soft french cheeses.

Timely revive. Doing some cheese shopping later. What did you end up with?

RACLETTE!

I am only here for a couple of days so was just doing my shopping for stuff to take back (everything but the bagel topping, rice crackers, other seasonings) so I only got the raclette to eat now. Although I was with L last night and we met up at Murrays. We got some taleggio, a St Marcellin like cheese made in Vermont and another american cheese called Good Thunder? That said it was supposed to be like reblochon and pont l'eveque but it was not. It was still good though.

At Trader Joe's though I feel like there was also a new St Marcellin like cheese that didn't have an AOC but was french.