Walking through the grocery store looking for a quick dessert or fresh bread seems simple enough, but some stores just don’t deliver what you’d expect from their bakery sections. Whether it’s stale donuts, overly sweet cookies, or products that taste more like chemicals than cake, not all grocery chain bakeries are worth your time or money. Some stores have amazing reputations but terrible baked goods, while others surprise you with what they can produce right in the store.
Target bakeries rarely offer fresh baked items
Most Target stores don’t actually have a real bakery at all. When you walk past what looks like a bakery section, those cookies and pastries sitting there actually came to the store frozen and packaged. Everything gets a date sticker once it thaws out, which makes it seem fresh when it’s really not. The few Super Target locations that exist do have actual baking happening, but even that involves frozen dough that just gets popped in the oven after rising overnight.
The muffins at Super Target arrive as frozen disks that employees transfer into muffin pans before baking. One person who tried them said they tasted slightly fishy, which is definitely not what you want from a breakfast treat. Finding these bakery items at Target can be almost impossible anyway, since most locations barely stock them. If you’re counting on Target for baked goods, you’ll probably end up disappointed and heading somewhere else.
Kroger bakery products taste overwhelmingly sweet
Sugar overload is the main problem with anything coming from Kroger’s bakery section. The cookies don’t taste like chocolate, vanilla, or whatever they’re supposed to be – they just taste like pure sugar with nothing else going on. Even by grocery store standards, where you don’t expect bakery quality products, Kroger manages to fall short. The cakes look okay from a distance, but once you actually taste them, that overwhelming sweetness takes over everything.
Customers regularly complain about bad experiences with Kroger baked goods. One person reported getting a cinnamon roll that smelled and tasted terrible, while another person straight up called their pie garbage. The store offers a wide variety of different baked items, but none of them really stand out as being good. When a grocery chain can’t get basic things like cookies and cinnamon rolls right, that’s a pretty clear sign to shop elsewhere for your sweet treats.
Harris Teeter quality dropped after the Kroger buyout
Harris Teeter used to be the place where parents took their kids for free balloons and sugar cookies while grocery shopping. That nostalgia still brings people in, but the reality doesn’t match those fond memories anymore. Since Kroger bought out Harris Teeter, the bakery quality has gone downhill fast. The free balloons disappeared entirely, though they did bring back free sugar cookies for kids. Unfortunately, people say the cookie recipe changed and they’re not nearly as good as before.
The donut icing at Harris Teeter has been described as hard and stale, which is about the worst thing you can say about donut icing. Multiple shoppers have pointed out that fresh products and Harris Teeter don’t really go together anymore. When people who grew up shopping at a store start warning others away from it, that tells you something important changed. The combination of declining quality and taste issues puts Harris Teeter near the bottom of grocery store bakeries worth visiting.
Sam’s Club charges membership fees for average baked goods
Paying an annual fee just to shop somewhere means you expect better quality than what free-to-enter stores offer. Sam’s Club doesn’t really deliver on that expectation when it comes to their bakery. Sure, their cakes come in lots of different options and you can customize them as sheet cakes or even three-tier round cakes. They taste pretty decent too, which makes it even more confusing why their cupcakes are so disappointing.
The cupcakes at Sam’s Club taste completely different from the cakes, even when you get matching options. The texture changes, the taste is off, and it doesn’t make sense considering they should be using similar recipes. When you’ve had a good experience with their larger cakes, you’d naturally think the smaller version would be just as good. That inconsistency between products, combined with charging people to shop there for mediocre results, puts Sam’s Club below other grocery stores that don’t require memberships.
Safeway doesn’t bake most products in their stores
When you see a bakery section at a grocery store, you probably assume they’re actually baking things there. Safeway doesn’t do much of that at all. They don’t even make their own icing, which seems like a pretty basic thing for a bakery to handle. The cake designs stay simple and basic because they’re not really set up for anything complicated. If you’re okay with plain and simple, some people do say the cakes taste alright despite not being made in-house.
The one good thing about Safeway is their bread, which they claim gets baked fresh between four and six in the evening every day. The problem is that this doesn’t actually happen at all locations, so you can’t count on it. Their prices usually match Walmart’s, but Friday deals can sometimes make their bakery items incredibly cheap. Those occasional good prices help a bit, but overall, Safeway plays it too safe with their bakery to really impress anyone.
Walmart bakery items taste artificial and processed
Walmart wins on price but loses on pretty much everything else when it comes to baked goods. Almost everything in their bakery section arrives frozen or prepackaged, then gets set out like it’s fresh. The taste makes it obvious these aren’t real bakery items. Everything comes across as too sweet with a weird artificial aftertaste that lingers. If you want a traditional bakery experience with real ingredients and actual baking, Walmart is the opposite of that.
Ordering a custom cake at Walmart is unpredictable. Sometimes you can get one the same day, other times it might take several days depending on how busy the store is. The inconsistency makes it hard to rely on them when you need something for a specific event. Some people swear by Walmart’s baked goods because they’re so cheap and sweet, but that’s really the only reason to consider them. The national chain earns a below-average spot because while they’re not the absolute worst, they’re definitely not good either.
Aldi cinnamon rolls are dry and disappointing
Cinnamon rolls should be soft, gooey, and worth the calories. Aldi’s version misses all of those marks completely. The icing on top turns into a weird papery sheet that you can practically peel off in one piece like construction paper. It doesn’t taste like vanilla or anything else pleasant, just bland sweetness that seems like an afterthought. The actual roll underneath is even worse, coming out dry no matter what you do to it.
The cinnamon filling tastes grainy and cheap, like they used the lowest quality cinnamon possible and then added too much of it. Warming them up in the microwave doesn’t help at all. These cinnamon rolls lack any of the buttery, molten quality that makes good cinnamon rolls worth eating. Even refrigerated cinnamon rolls from the dairy section would be better than these sad excuses for breakfast pastries. It’s hard to understand why anyone would buy these more than once.
Aldi Danishes use cheap bread instead of pastry
Real Danishes use a special layered pastry dough that creates a light, flaky texture. Aldi’s version tastes like someone threw together leftover bread dough with extra sugar and called it a Danish. The raspberry ones are particularly bad, with just two thin stripes of jam running through the middle. You barely get any jam in each bite, and what you do get tastes sickeningly sweet. The sugary icing and tiny bits of streusel on top don’t help at all.
The cheese Danish version isn’t much better, using a bland cream that doesn’t have the tanginess of real cream cheese. It just tastes like wet sugary icing pretending to be cheese filling. The entire product comes across as dry and boring, nothing like what you’d get from an actual bakery. Both versions fail to deliver on what a Danish is supposed to be. These definitely rank among Aldi’s worst bakery offerings, with very few redeeming qualities to justify buying them.
Aldi croissants smell like hydrogenated oil
Opening a package of Aldi croissants hits you with the smell of cheap hydrogenated oil right away. That’s not what croissants are supposed to smell like at all. While they do have visible layers inside, biting into one makes all those layers immediately squish together into one greasy blob. The butter leaves an unpleasant coating on your tongue that doesn’t go away quickly. Store-bought croissants are never as good as bakery ones, but these are particularly disappointing.
The taste is bland and lacks the rich, buttery quality that makes croissants worth eating. You could potentially save these by stuffing them with ham and arugula to disguise what they actually taste like. As plain croissants though, they’re not worth buying. The greasy texture and chemical smell make them hard to enjoy on their own. If you’re craving croissants, spending a bit more at a real bakery makes way more sense than settling for these.
Not every grocery store bakery deserves your money or attention. Some chains focus more on looking like they have a bakery than actually producing quality baked goods. The stores at the bottom of this list share common problems like using frozen products, adding too much sugar to cover up poor quality, and charging you for membership while delivering average results. Next time you need something sweet or want fresh bread, think twice before grabbing whatever’s closest and consider whether that particular store’s bakery is actually worth it.
