Are the things like coleslaw, potato salad, pasta salad, etc., in the grocery store deli case typically made in the store or are they generally commercially prepared stuff that comes to the store in big plastic buckets? I know there will be exceptions, but what is the general rule?
I ask because my local supermarket, an independent, non-chain store sells some items alongside, but not in, the deli case that are marked as “Store Made”, things like meatloaf, breaded chicken or pork cutlets, meatballs, fried eggplant, etc. Recently they expanded their deli case and also put up several new items alongside the things labeled as Store Made; the new items are in the same kind of package as the Store Made, shrink wrapped on a foam or cardboard tray, with the same kind of crude ink jet printed label as the other stuff, but without the words “Store Made”. The ingredients of the store made stuff reads like a recipe you might use at home but the ingredients on the new items read like the typical list of chemicals you find in processed food-like substances.
They had some biscuits displayed on top of the deli case yesterday. They were in a plastic bag with only a 99 cent price sticker, no other label. I asked if they were store made and the woman said “No. They’re Pillsbury. They come in frozen.” I tried them. They were everything you imagine a frozen, commercially made biscuit would be … flavorless with a nasty texture.
So I got to wondering … are all those fancy bean salads and casseroles they display so nicely and scoop out of the lettuce and parsley decorated bowl just the same stuff you get when you buy the commercial things with a label on them?
Depends entirely on the individual store. It can even vary within a chain.
I worked for Safeway for 12 years and our store’s deli didn’t make jack shit. The potato salads and whatnot came in 5-gallon buckets from a generic food manufacturer and the deli staff simply scooped it into the big bowls in the display case.
At the smaller Shopper’s Food near my house they also ship the prepared foods in, but the larger one a bit farther away makes at least some of the stuff in-store.
I work for a small mom-and-pop type grocery store and everything except a couple of the bakery items is shipped in frozen or in big buckets. The only exceptions are that they make banana bread in-store when they get an over abundance of over-ripe bananas and sometimes they’ll bake and sell the Pillsbury turnovers and whatnot if they are close to expiration.
Here’s a Washington Post story about grocery store prepared foods and a chart detailing the prepared foods of a few DC-area stores. Of those, Safeway was the only one that didn’t prepare anything in-house, however note that the others are high-end or specialty chains.
Around here (Dallas/Ft. Worth), I think the Whole Foods and Central Market locations do make their own food. More run-of-the-mill places like Kroger, Tom Thumb(Safeway), and Wal-Mart almost certainly do roast their own rotisserie chickens, and probably make their own bread, but I don’t think they make their own potato salad or anything like that.
Where I used to live there was a nearby bakery plant which supported a regional chain of mainstream groc stores. They actually baked a lot of product. You could smell it when you drove by.
Whether they made the dough from scratch I don’t know. At the stores they sold the bread in 3 different modes: You could buy chilled unbaked loaves, factory baked at that plant, and they had a small fraction they baked at the store itself.
I talked with the store bakery workers; they mostly decorated cakes & doughnuts which they said were actually baked (or fried) at the plant I mentioned. They didn’t know whether the batter or dough was made from scratch there or at some larger factory.
I saw firsthand a couple of weeks ago that Lucky prepares their deli coleslaw in-house. I wanted some, but the bowl in the deli case was all but empty. The clerk came back out with a coleslaw kit - rather like the “Fresh Express” bagged stuff sold in the produce section, but in a brown box with much more pre-sliced cabbage and carrot in separate bags plus a bag of slaw dressing.
Tear open bags, pour into bowl, stir and presto! House-made coleslaw.
I used to work for a local grocery store chain here in SoCal. About 75% the stuff in the deli case came out of a box or bag, the rest was made from scratch. Most of it was in fact the same stuff you could buy boxed or bagged in the rest of the store, just shipped to the deli in commercial quantities.
You left out Market Street! Our food-service side makes most of the stuff we sell. Salad bar, dips, potato salad, and similar stuff are almost all in-house. Hot bar and the cold-food section have some pre-pack sides but the meats and green vegetables are almost all from scratch. Pizza is on frozen crusts, but assembled and baked as needed. Soups are about 50/50. We fry and season our own tortilla chips. And, yes, we do our own rotisserie chickens.
Most of our frozen stuff comes from one source; IIRC they make it on contract as approved by the company chef. Those things might even be from the store’s own recipes.
The bakery, I think, uses mostly frozen stuff that they thaw and bake. Produce squeezes their own juice (orange and grapefruit at least), and cuts fruit for bowls.
There isn’t a Market Street within 15 miles of my house. But yeah, based on my experience with the Southlake one early on while my wife and I were dating, it’s a great store.
Thanks for the info. Looks like unless an item is somehow specifically labeled as “store made” it is likely not, unless maybe you actually see them making it.
I had never thought about this; I almost never buy those prepared deli case foods since those I have tried were not really very good … except, of course, the chicken with the extra fat injected.
The meatloaf and such that my local store labels as “Store Made” are pretty much OK; not great but certainly acceptable. I find it annoying that they are now putting out commercially prepared chemoindustrial-food crap in packaging identical to the “real” food in yet another attempt to confuse unwary shoppers.
Judging by my own experience, things I’ve read, and the responses of the other posters in this thread, it seems the “general rule” would be: upscale supermarkets (Wegman’s, Whole Foods, Fresh Market, etc.) and “Mom-and-Pop” grocers are more likely to be making prepared foods in-house, and “middle-tier” high-volume national chains (Kroger, Safeway, Walmart, etc.) are more likely to be selling mass-produced generic prepared foods. Exceptions abound, of course (for example, Costco is definitely a “high-volume national chain,” but nearly all of their ready-to-eat prepared foods are made in-house).
I’m not sure why you’d think otherwise. In general, a grocery store is in the business of selling food items (cans of soup, bags of flour, bottles of soda, etc.) but it ain’t a restaurant.
Like I said, I had never really thought about it before this recent experience with the commercially prepared chemical-laden stuff being placed right alongside the store made food made with only home-style ingredients in identical packaging except for the missing words “Store Made.”
If the stuff in the deli case is the same as the stuff across the aisle in the branded container listing all the ingredients, what purpose does it serve other to attempt deceive the customer by making them think the deli case items are somehow fresher, better, or more wholesome than the prepackaged stuff?
And I wasn’t trying to hide my bias. I do tend to avoid a lot of highly processed, chemical laden food-like substances and feel no shame for doing so – but gimme Cheez Whiz on my steak sandwich, please. I ain’t a fanatic about it.
And yes, I agree with you it ought to be a law to have a full ingredient list on all bulk food like that as well as all restaurant menus. As somebody forced to eat out a lot while traveling I’d like to know when it’s fresh and simple versus … not.
I don’t know the answer, but my local Whole Foods has lots of prepared foods. Once i bought some breaded fried chicken breasts-they were tough as nails. They obviously had been waiting around a while.
Isn’t there? I see ingredient lists on deli items and bulk bins everywhere I shop, as far as I recall. I look at ingredient lists rather obsessively… my gripe is that they aren’t required on alcohol.
I’m having trouble picturing this. Can you give an example of an item that’s available both ways? In other words, is there some food product that’s for sale both as “the commercially prepared chemical-laden stuff” AND “the store made food” that you can identify? For example: chicken salad that’s sold in a pre-packed tub with lots o’ingredients vs. chicken salad that’s labelled as “Store Made” with “only home-style ingredients.”
The reason I’m asking is because generally, I can take a guess what’s going to have a laundry list of additives and what won’t. For instance, the example from **gotpasswords **was coleslaw:
By definition (it’s just a freaking’ salad) the slaw itself is going to show “home-style ingredients” (namely, cabbage and carrot) while the premade dressing will likely have xanthan gum and other “chemicals” in it.