Trader Joe’s

From its earliest days under its current name, Trader Joe’s was designed to appeal to a growing college-educated population with the ability to travel internationally – people who would develop tastes for exotic items they couldn’t easily find locally. Across over 560 stores, Trader Joe’s today offers everything from microwavable Indian meals and Mexican tamales to bags of ghost pepper chips and bottles of triple ginger beer – recipes that ranged from obscure to non-existent across America when the chain was being built in the late 1950s and 1960s.

This article serves as a catchall for some of the noteworthy things we’ve found at Trader Joe’s. Just one example: In many parts of the country, Trader Joe’s became the primary if not exclusive vendor of French macaron cookies, which at one point were considered so challenging to produce that bakeries such as Ladurée were shipping them via airplanes from France to New York City. Restaurants would buy out Trader Joe’s local inventories and offer the cookies as their own desserts.