In a recent Trader Joe’s podcast, hosts Tara Miller and Matt Sloan revealed that this season there are a whopping 469 winter-themed products on the store’s shelves. Last year, there were 473 items to hit the aisles. Members of an official holiday tasting panel don ugly sweaters and begin tasting and choosing as early as Valentine’s Day.
The nearly 500 items — everything from gingerbread ice cream to crunchy chili with orange, cranberry and onion — will only be available until the new year. After that, they’ll be gone, the podcast confirmed. Of those products, 86 are brand new for this year, Miller revealed, up from last year’s 66 new products. Among them: Shrimp Pouches of Many Colors — tiny shrimp dumplings in red, white, yellow and green — and a waffle and pancake mix that’s sure to please the kiddos on Christmas morning (it’s cinnamon bun flavored).
Here’s the wild part: Typical big brand grocery stores carry around 50,000 items on any given day, but Trader Joe’s only carries around 4,000. It still has such a cult following that the store is able to stock 10% of its inventory in the last two months of the year with holiday-themed items and sell out many of them.
