THE BEST THINGS TO BUY AT TRADER JOE’S (ACCORDING TO OUR FAMILY)

A love of Trader Joe’s is a shared love in my family but I’m the only one lucky enough to live near one. That means that before any trip home I make sure I go and stock up on all of our favorites to bring with me and I have fun grabbing some fun things to try together too as I come across them. Here’s a roundup of our family’s favorites that we would jump to recommending if asked!

THE CHEESES!

Hands down, our favorite thing about Trader Joe’s is their cheeses along with the reasonable price points that come with them. My dad stays keeps their grated and their shaved parmigiano reggiano stocked and the rest of us are sure to always have the shredded pizza seasoned toscano on hand. The unexpected cheddar, both by the block and the shredded, are long time favorites too. Rounding out the list of cheeses I’m constantly picking up is the goat cheese logs. The honey chèvre is a year round favorite and we wouldn’t dare celebrate a holiday without the blueberry vanilla goat cheese log making an appearance on the table!

THE SWEETS!

Next up is all the sweets – another beloved section to browse! For years I’ve been stocking up on their chocolate covered sea salt butterscotch caramels every time I head home and I would say they’re tied for our collective favorite with the toffee chips, little rectangles of toffee about the size of a fun size candy bar that’s covered in either dark or milk chocolate (great to have on hand for baking as well as snacking!). The scandinavian swimmers are a favorite, but only in my house, along with the hold the cone mini ice cream cones – although I’d argue that’s only because ice cream usually doesn’t travel well so I’ve never taken them with me! The cones come in vanilla, chocolate, and chocolate chip flavors and my seven year old wouldn’t hesitate to tell you to try any of them. 🙂 The chocolate coating is the perfect touch too!

THE SNACKS!

This post really is covering all my favorite category of foods! My most recently discovered favorite that my mom and I share is their seasonal kettle corn. I’m sad I haven’t seen any new flavor in stores lately, but we loved their maple sea salt kettle popcorn from the fall. Even better though was the key lime kettle popcorn they had over the summer with the sugary bits being a perfect balance to the tartness of the lime. I’m hoping these are going to be permanently in the yearly rotation. Their pita bite crackers always find their way into my cart too (because you need something to put all that good cheese on), and the parmesan crisps have made their way into the list of staples too. My three year old niece’s favorite is the cinnamon schoolbook cookies – they might have cookie in the name, but these are essentially little letter shaped cinnamon flavored version of animal crackers so we consider them a snack!