I never enjoyed chicken salad until I started working at a deli in my early 20s. It quickly became a lunch staple for me, even though I had so many other sandwich options at my fingertips.
Nowadays, I usually get my chicken salad fix at home when I have leftover grilled or rotisserie chicken. However, I wanted to see if I could find something worthwhile at the supermarket to enter my lunch rotation.
So, I visited four major supermarket chains — Costco, Trader Joe’s, Wegmans, and Whole Foods — and bought premade chicken salad at each one.
I taste-tested all four with some crackers and ranked them from worst to first. Here’s how they stacked up.
I wouldn’t buy the Wegmans grilled chicken salad again.
When I visited Wegmans, a 16-ounce tub of grilled chicken salad cost $15. Since that price seemed borderline outrageous, I hoped the chicken salad would be delicious.
However, I was disappointed. There wasn’t much flavor to it at all — the prevailing taste was that of mayonnaise — and it had an oddly grainy texture that closely resembled tuna salad.
There was a good amount of chicken in the mix, which might help explain the price, but the meat lacked flavor and wasn’t especially moist.
The price point, more than the chicken salad itself, earned Wegmans the bottom spot on my ranking.
Trader Joe’s Wine Country chicken salad was too sweet for me.
Across multiple visits to three separate Trader Joe’s in my area, the closest option I found to the others on this list was the Wine Country chicken salad. However, it differed slightly from the others as it incorporated sweetened dried cranberries and pecans.
At first, I thought that might give it an unfair advantage in the ranking, since I normally enjoy a chicken salad with dried cranberries. The $5 price also seemed like a good deal for a 12-ounce container.
However, this chicken salad was way too sweet for my taste and not quite hearty enough. It seemed like there was a lot more goopy liquid than chunks of chicken, and the cranberries tasted like candy.
Overall, I thought this tasted more like a salad dressing than a deli salad.
Costco’s chicken salad was just OK.
I found the Kirkland Signature chicken salad in Costco’s prepared foods section. It was priced at $6 a pound, making it the least-expensive option I tried on a per-pound basis. The container I picked up contained about 2 pounds of chicken salad.
The salad had the biggest chunks of chicken of any I tried by far, but it practically shimmered with grease.
I also thought it was bland in terms of flavor. However, since I was already familiar with the Kirkland Signature rotisserie chicken, the briny, brothy flavor of the meat was easy to pick out.
There was celery in the mix, but it added more flavor than texture; ideally, I’d prefer that reversed.
The chicken salad was fine but not especially good, and it’s hard to imagine a situation in which I’d want two pounds of it.
I’d buy the Whole Foods classic chicken salad again.
Of the four chicken salads I tried, the version from Whole Foods was the only one that was scooped fresh at a deli counter. It was also the only one I’d consider buying again.
At $14 per pound, it was significantly more expensive than the chicken salads from Costco and Trader Joe’s but slightly less expensive than the one from Wegmans. I appreciated that I could order only as much as I needed — a half-pound, in this case.
It was easily the best-tasting of the four salads I tried. The chicken, chopped up into bite-sized pieces, was moist and tasted fresh. Although hardly bold in flavor, the salad was nuanced with the earthy sweetness of red onions, notes of rosemary, and a touch of mustardy bite.
Unlike the others, it tasted better than anything I could easily make at home.
The post I tried chicken salad from Costco, Trader Joe’s, Wegmans, and Whole Foods. There was only one I’d buy again. appeared first on Business Insider.
