The Budget Beef Buy You’re Missing Out on at Costco
How do you usually shop for meat when you’re in Costco? You go to the meat section, pick out a package, and put it in your cart, right? Wrong! Well, that’s probably how you do it. But there’s a better way — when it comes to ground beef, at least.
See, we ran this story earlier this year and one of the items really stuck with us. Costco employees dished on Reddit about their favorite budget grocery finds and one thing kept coming up again and again: chubs!
According to Reddit user Fixall: “For extra lean (and cheap) ground beef, ask the meat department for a 10-pound chub. We sell our regular ground beef (88/12 percent) for $3.49 a pound. The way we make it is, we take our fat trimmings from cutting steaks and mix it with the chubs to bring up the fat content and increase our profits. The 10-pound chubs are probably sitting around 5 to 8 percent fat and only cost $2.99 a pound! You’ll have to ask for these specifically as we don’t normally put them out for sale.”
Other users said they were skeptical of whether or not this trick would work, but some people said they tried it, and it actually worked. “The butcher was a little surprised that I wanted a whole chub but he weighed it, labeled it, and passed it out the window to me,” says Bokkasrealm. “The cashier ringing it up said he had never seen it before.”
Of course, prices vary by location (as with many grocery items at Costco). But generally speaking, these much-leaner chubs are cheaper than regular ground beef. The name is terrible, though, and we’d honestly rather them be called “meat tubes.”
What to Do with All That Ground Beef When You Get Home
Have you ever done this or seen it happen? Tell us in the comments below!