Grocery Taste Tests

You might not have even heard of the winning brand!

These meatballs are on a roll!

We've got a pick for all sorts of preferences.

"Everyone liked how the sweetness of the sauce paired with the savory pepperoni, and the spice blend was perfectly balanced."

Number two was surprising, a little confusing, and yet very delicious.

If you have kids, you almost certainly have a bag of chicken nuggets in your freezer right now. Even if you don’t have kids, nuggets likely have a place in your kitchen — or at least in your heart. They’re super-fast, protein-packed, and pretty hard to resist. And there are all sorts of ways you can turn them into an adult-friendly dinner. But not all nuggets are created equal. Some bake up crisp, while others are gummy.

There’s a special magic to tater tots. Like french fries, they’re crispy on the outside and soft on the inside, but their chubby little nugget shape offers an entirely different eating experience. And they’re the key ingredient to my favorite punny snack, tot-chos (nachos made with tots instead of chips). Adding to the brilliance that is tater tots, some frozen food brands have taken the concept and applied it to veggies with a bit more nutritional oomph than pure potatoes.

We’re almost a month into a new year; are you a new you yet? (We hope not; we liked you just as you were in 2018!) One of your resolutions was probably to start taking lunch to work — or to eat better, spend less money on food, win the office title of She Who Packs the Best Lunches, blah blah blah. You know what, though? Packing a good lunch every day can be tough.

I tried five different coffees from Costco and this one was (surprisingly) my favorite.

Every day I swear I’m not going to click on Facebook’s self-generated “On This Day” montage, and, every day, I find myself scrolling through a decade’s worth of posts that include “The Time I Was Deeply into Desperate Housewives” and “The Time I Was Deeply into Crossfit,” and those 10 or 15 minutes when I wouldn’t shut up about Whole30. (There was admittedly some overlap between those last two.

Until this week, I’m not sure that I’d ever eaten a KIND bar outside of an airplane, trying to unwrap one while being smashed by my own tray table thanks to a stranger’s fully reclined seat. They’re always available at airport gift shops and, when my snack options are either a KIND bar or, like, a $34 bag of beef jerky, those nuts and seeds will always win.

Guacamole is so easy to make that it’s almost silly to buy it from the store. But sometimes you just don’t have 10 minutes to chop and mash your way to homemade. Maybe you’re heading straight to a party from work, or grabbing some snacks on the road while heading for the beach, or maybe you’d rather focus your efforts on making an entrée and not an app? Besides, you can’t always get your hands on perfectly ripe avocados right when you need them.

I love to make rich, gooey mac and cheese from scratch with a creamy béchamel, heaping handfuls of sharp cheddar, and some Parmesan tossed in for good measure. Or if I’m keeping it simple, I’ll make a quick sauce of heavy cream reduced until thick, with some herbs and cheese whisked in. I also have a special love for the cheap, buck-a-box stuff, too, mainly because my kids can whip it up themselves whenever they need an after-school snack.

Aside from the price and the label, there are a few key differences.

Chicken nuggets in almost any form beyond homemade are a much-demonized convenience food. It’s difficult to call which presentation of convenience is more polarizing: the drive-thru chicken nuggets or the box of store-bought, frozen chicken nuggets. Truthfully, I once held the same distain for both and swore up and down that my future kids would never eat mass-produced nuggets. Ah, how little we know about parenting before we are parents.

As Jane Austen once said, “It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a person in possession of a mouth, must love pizza.” Okay, maybe I’m misquoting her a bit, but the sentiment rings true. I’ve never in my life met a person who didn’t like pizza — not even the cheese-hater I married.

We asked the company to send a list of the 10 best sellers and then methodically tried them all.

Could a boxed mix compare to homemade pancakes? The only way to find out would be to try every pancake mix we could get our hands on. Our favorite is easy to find.

Not to be dramatic, but a breakfast sandwich can make or break your entire day. We tried seven from national and regional chains and ranked them from worst to best.

Take a stroll down the baking aisle and you’ll quickly see that the choices are many — especially when it comes to yellow cake mix. Extra-moist, golden, tender crumb? At the end of the day, we want a cake that’s going to meet our needs. We tried a bunch of popular brands and discovered that there is a boxed cake out there just for you. Good cake, bad cake — it all boils down to preference. So what kind of yellow cake are you after?

There’s no denying that creamy chickpea dip (known as hummus or hommus!) is downright delicious. Whether we’re craving a savory afternoon snack or packing for a picnic in the park, hummus and pita chips is practically a universal favorite. In what was one of our most favorite taste tests yet, staffers in our office tried seven national brands of traditional hummus. Keep reading to find our thoughts on all seven brands, as well as our most favorite hummus of the bunch.

It’s the go-to condiment for French fries; a must-have for kids; and a regular accompaniment to hamburgers, hot dogs, and veggie burgers. Yes, we’re talking about ketchup! We tried seven well-known brands of ketchup (with French fries for dipping, of course!) and picked our three favorites. Keep reading to see which ones won.