5 Exciting New Products We Spotted at Trader Joe’s

Despite the intense physical demands of shopping (and parking!) at Trader Joe’s, we’re ride or die, for both their tried and true products like the fan favorite mandarin orange chicken or dark chocolate peanut butter cups, as well as their new, inventive products. Every time we think we’ve seen and eaten it all, Trader Joe’s hits us with another banger and proves us wrong. Here are the five most enticing new Trader Joe’s products we spotted on our most recent trip to TJ’s. 

Chocolatey Drizzled Strawberry Kettle Popcorn

We love butter-blasted movie theater-style popping corn as well as a fun furikake dusted take on it, but one of the most glorious things about this snack is that it’s just as good sweet as it is savory. Kettle corn is a strong start, but the good gets better when you add a chocolate drizzle and bright red gems of strawberry. If you’re one of the kids who ate all of the freeze-dried berries out of your parents’ Special K cereal, you’ll be happy with this popcorn. If you’re not, please don’t tell our parents because we’ve finally convinced them that every kid does it.

Brookie Caramel Candy Clusters

Brookies? Yum. Caramel? Yum. Candy? Yum. Clusters? Three outta four ain’t bad. Having a name with a “yes, please” ratio like this, this product is real-life click-bait and we’re excited to fall into the trap. Since “brookie” is already a combination of brownie and cookie, the treat epitomizes the concept of more is more. Combining familiar flavors like chocolate chip cookies with a sophisticated sea salt sprinkle, these sweets are doing some real work alongside Nerds Clusters to reframe “clusters” as a drool-worthy word. 

Spaghetti Carbonara

If we’re in the mood for pasta carbonara, we’re in the mood for it now. Not after the water boils, not after the pancetta is rendered, not after we finally read the recipe halfway through cooking and realize we don’t have a key ingredient. “Couldn’t you just go out and order some?” Out? You mean that place where they expect us to have pasta and keep our jeans buttoned? Get real. Now we can stay in our stretchy groutfits, quell our hangeriness-induced Dr. Hyde persona, and cook up dinner in the time it takes for the Hulu ads to play because, come on, paying for no ads? In this economy? 

Pizza Party Potato Chips

We blame our Pavlovian response to finishing books on those elementary school pizza parties we got for reading the most. As we near the back cover, our tummies rumble but our hearts sink as we realize that if we want pizza, we have to buy our own. The upside is getting to call the shots on what constitutes “pizza.” We’re no longer confined to the binary “plain or pepperoni?” We no longer have to go through the effort of manually putting potato chips on the pizza. We no longer have to explain ourselves when people judge us for putting potato chips on the pizza. Instead of all of that, we can just grab a few handfuls from this bag featuring kettle chips flavored like cheese, garlic, pepperoni, and pizza sauce. Sure, we might miss the cheese-pull, but this crunch game? Pizza could never. Unless we forget it in the airfryer. 

Mini Mochi Rice Nuggets

We love mochi, but so much of it gets stuck—not in our teeth, where we long for it to be, but surrounding ice cream. A famously chewy substance surrounding a block of ice cream? There isn’t enough Sensodyne in the world. Mochi cakes are hard to come by and a little too involved to make, so you can bet we were more than thrilled to see mini mochi rice nuggets hit the shelves. These little orbs of flavor are a crunchy version of mochi. They’re a shrunken variety of TJ’s already well-loved mochi rice nuggets, and ready to be enjoyed as a texture-tastic topping, or just by the handful.