I’m kind of embarrassed to admit this, but yesterday was my first time shopping at Trader Joe’s. I’ve had experience with their products, like I knew they sold the awesome mochi ice cream, but I had never actually been there myself.

I’m not sure what I thought. They definitely had some amazing and unique products (like Indian snacking chips, Casaba melons, and acai jelly) but I thought there would be MORE of a selection than there was. It seems my expectations were built up far too high because I was anticipating a Jewel or Dominick’- sized grocery store of organic, unique and quality foodstuffs, but well, I just found it to be…small.

While I know they hand pick their products for quality, and don’t try to offer every brand known to man, I was missing a few things in my grocery shopping search. It’s probably hit-or-miss sort of situation, but it seemed that everything I was looking for wasn’t there. I wanted a lingonberry spread to make Swedish pancakes at home, and they didn’t have one. I wanted flavored Fage yogurt and they didn’t have that either. I wanted some fresh basil. The list goes on – I could have used more chocolate, more tea, more of a whole bunch of things!

I did, however, come away with some interesting and satisfactory purchases. To name a few, I bought some ginger snaps, chocolate covered blueberries, fage yogurt, matcha latte powder, granola, and of course…mochi ice cream. So far I’ve tried the ginger snaps and they’re delicious!

While their chocolate section was lacking in my opinion, they did have these awesome bricks of Ghirardelli baking chocolate. That was pretty sweet.

Would I go back? Yep! I bet I’ll get addicted to a whole bunch of their products…as if I’m not already (see below.)

UPDATE: I’m fastly becoming addicted to those Ginger Snaps, AND I give the frozen Trader Joe’s meal that I had for lunch an A+.

-Hillary, planning on eating some mango AND green tea mochi tonight
Editor, Recipe4Living

Posted by Hillary, 4:55 PM

This entry was posted on Monday, August 20th, 2007 at 4:55 pm and is filed under gourmet, grocery store. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.