Sporked Staff
Contrary to popular boomer belief, making coffee at home won’t suddenly make you a millionaire, but it will save you money in the long run. And hey, if you’re buying the best coffee at the grocery store, then it’s not a huge sacrifice to forgo a daily $6 latte. Some of the best grocery store coffee really rivals your go-to café.
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Whether you’re trying to save cash or you just like being in control of your own coffee, we can help. Over the course of multiple taste tests, we’ve set out to find coffee worthy of your cutest, coziest, most breakable mugs. From bottled cold brew to instant coffee and canned lattes, we want you to make the best coffee at home possible. There’s a lot of grounds we haven’t covered (pun intended), but for now, here’s all the best store bought coffee we’ve found so far.
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- La Monarca Organic Cafe De Olla Ground Coffee
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Too many flavored coffees taste cheap, gimmicky, and like burnt beans soaked in artificial flavors. But La Monarca’s Cafe de Olla is the real deal. The beans are roughly chopped and mixed with visible cinnamon and brown sugar flakes. The result is a rich, warmly spiced, zingy brew that tastes really fresh. (Though we’ll admit that it has a very subtle perfume-y quality to it—if you’re sensitive to that, check out our other flavored coffee recs instead!)
Credit: Merc / World Market
- Cafe Bustelo Sweetened Iced Coffee
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Cafe Bustelo came in and crushed the store-bought iced coffee competition by a wide margin. It’s bright and acidic in the best way, and this is coming from a taste-tester and coffee fan who prefers dark roast. It’s sweetened, but it carries a balanced sweetness—just add some evaporated milk, and you have the perfect base for a cortadito. If you served this to us at a nice coffee shop, we’d be none the wiser.
Read the full ranking of the best iced coffee
Credit: Merc / Walmart
- Chamberlain Coffee Salted Caramel Latte with Oatmilk
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In addition to being a model and influencer, Emma Chamberlain is a coffee entrepreneur. We taste tested her entire line, and this canned caramel latte was the best coffee of the bunch. It’s sweet and creamy but the caramel flavor doesn’t overtake the flavor of the coffee itself. It strikes a nice balance. And we know it’s beside the point, but the packaging sure is cute, too.
Read the full ranking of the best Chamberlain Coffee
Credit: Merc / Walmart
- Organic Fair Trade Wake Up Blend Ground Coffee
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When we taste tested all the coffee from Trader Joe’s, we focused our attention on their canisters of pre-ground coffee so as not to die from a caffeine overdose. We’ll put their whole beans to the test in a future taste test, but for the time being, their Organic Fair Trade Wake Up Blend is the best coffee to buy if Trader Joe’s is your grocery destination of choice. A lot of the Trader Joe’s coffee we tasted was pretty acidic, but this one is rich and fruity rather than aggressively astringent. It goes down nice and smooth, and that’s about all we want from the best grocery store coffee—even the best cheap grocery store coffee.
Read the full ranking of the best Trader Joe’s coffee
Credit: Liv Averett
- Great Value 100% Arabica Colombian Ground Coffee
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Walmart’s Great Value brand sells a vast array of coffee pods for the ol’ Keurig—there are creamy ones and flavored ones, but the best overall was a standard Colombian K Cup. We have a Keurig at the office and I’ve used it to brew plenty of pricey, name brand K Cup pods, and I swear these grocery store brand coffee pods make a better cup of coffee. Of all the Great Value coffee we brewed, this medium-dark brew is the one I’d be happy to drink black (although, I wouldn’t turn up my nose at some of the best coffee creamer to go with it).
Read the full ranking of the best Walmart coffee pods
Credit: Merc / Walmart
- Twin Peaks Original Pour Over 100% Colombian Coffee
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When we recently updated our ranking of the best instant coffee, we looked beyond those sad freeze-dried crystals you stir into hot water and expanded our search to include pour-over pouches. What a game changer! Twin Peaks Colombian coffee may not be the best grocery store coffee (we had to seek it out online), but it’s so much more robust than the crystals you’ve been buying. It has a silky mouthfeel, a roasty aroma, and a toasty flavor to match. Sure, it’s technically brewed rather than truly instant coffee, but it’s ready in a jiff and these neat little sachets would be super easy to bring camping. (In my mind, camping is the primary instant coffee use case.)
Read the full ranking of the best instant coffee
Credit: Liv Averett / Amazon
- La Colombe Triple Latte
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A lot of canned lattes are basically just cans of milk with a little splash of coffee in the mix. I tried a lot of these things and couldn’t believe how few of them actually embody the toasty richness of an actual latte—do better, brands! That said, the best coffee from our canned latte taste test was this La Colombe Triple Latte. It smells like coffee and it actually tastes like coffee with a creamy kick. If you’re consistently running late in the mornings but require coffee to achieve consciousness, a four pack of these puppies is a great gift to buy yourself.
Read the full ranking of the best canned lattes
Credit: Merc / La Colombe
- Stumptown Coffee Roasters Cold Brew Concentrate
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Portland, Oregon-based Stumptown makes some of the best grocery store coffee. We love their cold brew (more on that in a sec), so it stands to reason that we’d also love their cold brew concentrate. Stumptown coffee has a really distinctive third-wave coffee shop sort of flavor—very roasty-toasty. And a great thing about the concentrate is that you can make your coffee as weak or as frighteningly strong as you want. The best coffee is customizable to your tastes.
Read the full ranking of the best cold brew concentrate
Credit: Liv Averett / Pavilions
- Stumptown Original Cold Brew Coffee
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We love Stok cold brew coffee, but it was bumped from the number one spot in our cold brew ranking by this Stumptown coffee. It really tastes like coffee that was brewed by a barista and it comes in a brown glass bottle so everyone will think you’re drinking a beer at 7:30 a.m. like a cool guy. It’s fresh and intense, and it’s some of the best store bought coffee if you can find it at your local grocery store.
Read the full ranking of the best bottled cold brew coffee
Credit: Liv Averett / Instacart
- Peet’s Pumpkin Spice Ground Light Roast
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Peet’s makes the best pumpkin spiced coffee in the game, hands down. When fall rolls around, we retry all the store-bought pumpkin spice blends on offer, and Peet’s is our reigning champ. First and foremost, it’s not too sweet. So many pumpkin spice brews go way too hard on the sweetness. Second: You get all the right fragrant spices, with a nice bite of clove that lingers with every sip. It’s good stuff. We just wish it was available year-round!
Read the full ranking of the best pumpkin spice coffee
Credit: Liv Averett / Target
Best Flavored Coffee
Rating:
10/10
Sporks
Best Iced Coffee
Rating:
9/10
Sporks
Best Chamberlain Coffee
Rating:
8/10
Sporks
Best Trader Joe’s Coffee
Rating:
8.5/10
Sporks
Best Walmart Coffee Pods
Rating:
9/10
Sporks
Best Instant Coffee
Rating:
9/10
Sporks
Best Canned Latte
Rating:
9.5/10
Sporks
Best Cold Brew Concentrate
Rating:
10/10
Sporks
Best Cold Brew
Rating:
10/10
Sporks
Best Pumpkin Spiced Coffee
Rating:
10/10
Sporks
Justine Sterling
Jordan Myrick
Ariana Losch
Jessica Block
