Episode 111: Can't Help Falling for this Trader Joe's Shopping List

Inside Trader Joe's

This episode of Inside Trader Joe's dives into the brand's fall shopping list, highlighting a variety of seasonal and limited-time products. From pumpkin-themed treats like

Key takeaways

• Trader Joe's emphasizes seasonal creativity with limited-time fall products while also offering year-round staples like London Fog Tea Concentrate.
• Product development involves extensive testing and customer feedback, especially for unique items like the Gouda with walnuts cheese.

Main topics

• Fall seasonal products at Trader Joe's
• Behind-the-scenes product development

Notable quotes

"You can serve this heated up, hot. You can serve it iced, cold." – on the versatility of London Fog Tea Concentrate.

Conclusion

The episode wraps up with appreciation for the team behind Trader Joe's

Transcript preview

Speaker 2 (0:00) The record for most people stuffed into a standard-sized phone booth is 25. Huh. Speaker 1 (0:06) I guess this must have been back when there were, like, phone booths. Speaker 2 (0:10) Yeah, March 20th, 1959. A group of students set the record by stacking and intertwining themselves. I mean, this set off a massive and thankfully short-lived... among college students to try this themselves. Okay, Speaker 1 (0:24) I'll pass. Speaker 2 (0:25) Today, we set a record of our own. Most Trader Joe's office crew members stuffed into a conference room simultaneously talking about new fall shopping list products in Speaker 1 (0:36) a single podcast. Ready for it. Let's go Inside Trader Joe's. Speaker 1 (0:47) I'm Tara Miller, Director of Words and Phrases and Clauses. And Speaker 2 (0:51) I'm Matt Sloan, the Culture and Innovation Guy at Trader Joe's. In Speaker 1 (0:55) a few moments, crew members on our product development and category management teams will join us here. They have some really great behind-the-scenes stories about several of these fall shopping list products. Speaker 2 (1:05) Got a lucky 13 products on this fall shopping list. How about we start with a little London Fog? And by Speaker 1 (1:12) that, I mean a London Fog tea. Before this product came to the tasting panel, I was unfamiliar with London Fog other than like... being in London when it's rainy or the raincoat of the same name. Speaker 2 (1:25) Yeah, it's not like a Jack the Ripper kind of scene here. It's not like the killer fog of London of years ago. It's a drink. It's an Earl Grey tea latte, most often sweetened. And that's what we got here. And what's cool about this, it's liquid concentrate. You just add whatever kind of milk or milk-like thing that you want to it to make a great latte, a London fog. Speaker 1 (1:49) You would only have to use four ounces of this concentrate along with your creamy beverage of choice to make that latte. Speaker 2 (1:58) Sure, and that would result in a 12-ounce. Okay. You can serve this heated up, hot. You can serve it iced, cold. And Speaker 1 (2:05) it costs less than you would pay for a single drink at a coffee or tea shop. Speaker 2 (2:10) Which is both true and crazy to me. Yeah. But there you have it. Speaker 1 (2:13) It's a really smooth drinking cup of tea. Speaker 2 (2:16) Earl Grey, of course, is delicious black tea scented and flavored with oil of bergamot, which is a citrus fruit. Classic combo. Speaker 1 (2:25) This is not one of those fall-only products, which a lot of the products we're going to talk about today are only for the fall. But this one is an everyday product, and it will live on the shelves in our coffee and tea section, I believe. Speaker 2 (2:37) Yeah. Speaker 1 (2:38) So, as you mentioned, Earl Grey tea, which is a component of London Fog, has the oil of bergamot, which is a citrus fruit. Our next product is a Mandarin Crunch pasta salad. Speaker 2 (2:51) Wow, I mean, even tangential segues work. So Speaker 1 (2:53) this is a salad in a tub. It's a 10.8 ounce. The dressing for the pasta salad is in a separate packet inside the container. So you really kind of have to take it out of the container to enjoy it in its best form. Speaker 2 (3:09) Fully tossed. It Speaker 1 (3:10) becomes a big bowl of pasta salad. It has a base of Mafalda. pasta noodles. And if you're not familiar with Mafalda, if you think about kind of a smaller lasagna noodle, it's got those ridges on it. Sounds like an Speaker 2 (3:25) old family name, Aunt Mafalda. Do Speaker 1 (3:27) you know that I had an Aunt Maldina, which is almost like Speaker 2 (3:29) Mafalda. Yeah. Speaker 1 (3:30) So Mandarin Crunch Pasta Salad with Mandarin oranges, diced apples, feta cheese, sweetened dried cranberries, and pumpkin seeds, and a balsamic vinaigrette. Speaker 2 (3:39) None of the things I normally associate with pasta salad, so that's kind of got me excited. Speaker 1 (3:43) It also has greens. It has arugula. and a little bit of celery, actually. A lot of stuff going on. Hold that container. It's pretty substantial. I mean, if Speaker 2 (3:51) I had to guess, that feels like 10.8 ounces. It is Speaker 1 (3:53) 10.8 ounces. You're pretty good at that. That one is a limited time in the store product. So that one's intended for fall. My guess is it will be near the other pasta salads. Good Speaker 2 (4:04) guess. Speaker 1 (4:04) That's a good guess. Speaker 2 (4:05) Good. Gouda. Uh Speaker 1 (4:07) -huh. Speaker 2 (4:08) Gouda. Uh-huh. We're talking cheese, of course. We're talking gouda, giving it a... American pronunciation. Gouda with walnuts. So good. If you're given to throwing a handful of walnuts or almonds on a cheese board or serving with cheese, this does one step better, one step for you. The walnuts are in the cheese, throughout the cheese. Speaker 1 (4:28) We've had this cheese before. Do you remember? I Speaker 2 (4:30) do. It's been a couple years is what I'm thinking. We like to every now and... then share really cool cheese finds with customers and then it goes away. Speaker 1 (4:39) Yeah, we call it spotlight cheese, right? That's right. So you might be walking by the cheese case at your Trader Joe's and see a little sign that says spotlight cheese. This one we had as a spotlight cheese, I think it was back in 2024. The response to it was fantastic. We sold through what we had brought in very quickly. And I think we asked the supplier in the Netherlands, hey, could you do this for us again? Because it's a really special cheese. It takes a while to... to make it happen. It should be in stores right around now for as long as we can keep it. And we're hoping that it lasts through the month of September. And then in October, you'll probably find another Spotlight cheese in your Trader Joe's. Speaker 1 (5:19) For the next few things on our shopping list, we thought it would be good to call in some help. Speaker 5 (5:26) Hi, I'm Allie. I'm one of the product developers here at Trader Joe's, and I'm really excited to talk about our new ice cream, our apple pie a la mode. Speaker 3 (5:35) Fantastic. And my name is Hasmeek, and I'm one of the frozen category managers, and I'm here to talk to you all about the holiday. Speaker 4 (5:43) Duchess potatoes. Excellent. I'm Arlene. I'm here to talk about the organic red and green leaf salad mix. Okay, Speaker 2 (5:50) you know, what I want to do is start with the most difficult thing first, adding excitement to salad. And in all seriousness, finding something new and interesting enough to squeeze onto the shelves of the produce section in our stores is really hard. Arlene, what did you come up with? It Speaker 4 (6:10) is challenging. Speaker 2 (6:11) That's putting it mildly. These are brutal projects. Speaker 4 (6:14) The Speaker 2 (6:14) produce team is like, Arlene, I need a new salad. Speaker 4 (6:17) Yes. So oftentimes what I would do is take a few of our bags of salad and mix them together. And what I had seen was that a lot of them were like kind of the flat leaves and I was like, okay, we need more texture and more color, which is why we came up with this one. One is a red arugula, but it has this nice line, red line that goes through. It's really beautiful. It does have more of the arugula, bitter, peppery taste, but blended with the rest of it, tastes really good. And then the other color that we added in were the beet greens, very much a purple leaf, and then spinach and frisee to give that like really nice look and texture. So that's what I thought of. And I think this mix kind of reminded me of when I would go to like farmer's market and they would have that vendor of like, 12 different salads and they would have like flowers in or just like different mix. I feel like this really in our way kind of meets that. Speaker 1 (7:10) I'm going to open the bag. It just smells so fresh and delicious and green. I've never seen the arugula with the purple veins in it before. I kind of love that. Speaker 2 (7:21) It's like it's turning into the Hulk or something. Speaker 1 (7:25) It's actually delicious. It's really good. It's just a really good salad, but elevated above what I would normally buy. I Speaker 2 (7:33) think it's cool that... In this lettuce mix, there's nothing that is actually lettuce. It's a salad made of different kinds of greens. The color notwithstanding, these are greens because they're leaves, leafy greens. Speaker 1 (7:45) Organic baby spinach, organic beet greens, organic red arugula, and organic frisee. And that's it. Speaker 2 (7:51) And that's enough. Speaker 1 (7:52) Well, it's fantastic because then you can do whatever you want with it, right? You want to add chopped nuts, add chopped nuts. You want to add some kind of cheese, add some kind of