The Costco Prepared Meal We Wish Was Sold Everywhere

Costco doesn’t mess around with its prepared meals. Its ready-to-go lunches, dinners, and deli options come thick and fast: September saw two new major arrivals to Costco stores, in the form of its honey sesame chicken stir-fry kit and its burrata salad. Now, those meals may not be to eveyrone’s tastes – and there’s the price of them, too, which can be way out of a lot of people’s budgets – but you can’t deny the store’s speed. Costco’s development kitchen must be a busy place.

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It’s not just its US branches that get the goods, either. Costco Canada’s just dropped a new meal kit that definitely looks the part, even if one of its parts needs a little bit more care and love. With a few tweaks (and some wider distribution), this could be a winner. 

Costco Kirkland Signature Pork Belly Ramen Kit

In the last few days of September, Costco Canada customers started to spy a new addition to its prepared foods section: Its Kirkland Signature Pork Belly Ramen Kit. As is always the case with Costco’s meal kits, these things are hefty: Each kit contains eight chashu braised pork slices, six soy-marinated eggs, shoyu ramen broth, ramen noodles, and green onions. They cost $12.99 CAD per kilo, and most packs come in at just over the $20 mark (so, around $14 USD, or slightly over, for the whole thing – which, as Costco meal prices go, isn’t too bad!). 

Pleasingly, too, Costco doesn’t just bundle everything into the broth here. As content creator @sopheats, who found the ramen in her store, shows, each aspect is individually packaged, with the noodles kept separate from the broth and meat. No sogginess, and for this, we give thanks.

But Does It Taste Good?

@sopheats also gave Cotco’s Pork Belly Ramen Kit a taste test, and while certain aspects of it shine, others fall by the wayside. The main issue here is the shoyu broth, which she gave a 3/10 – and others have said that it lacks depth. The chashu, though, is a winner, and the noodles also shine through. 

So…it’s a bit of a mixed bag at the moment, and given that ramen lives and dies by its broth, it doesn’t feel quite there yet. However, if Costco went back to the drawing board with this one and amped up the flavor and complexity, this one could be an all-timer. Good ramen is hard to do at home, and anything that makes life easier is a winner in our books.