I was pretty excited to see that this store had fresh pretzels in its bakery! Sadly, though, I bought one and it wasn't particularly good. I suppose for 99¢, my expectations shouldn't have been too high, but it's still a disappointment, especially since Fred Meyer's bakery is generally pretty good.
That's too bad about the pretzel being a dud. They do look appealing, but looks can be deceiving. I wonder if Fred Meyer (and QFC) have better bakeries than our Kroger stores do given your generally positive opinion of their bakeries. I'm not going to say baked goods from our Krogers are bad, but they are not in Randall's class and it isn't really close (granted, I'm not sure if Randall's bakeries are the same as Safeway's). I've never bought anything from an HEB bakery, but from what I hear from others, it seems HEB's bakery is probably better than Kroger's as well.
ReplyDeleteIt's really hard to say. It used to be that Albertsons' bakery was by far the best, but following the merger, they largely kept Safeway's bakery rather than Albertsons', and in the years since then, things have continued to go downhill. QFC, on the other hand, has put a good bit of effort into improving their bakery in recent years -- while I don't have many head-to-head comparisons, I can definitely say that QFC has the best donuts of the three in the Seattle area! (For some reason, at least some Fred Meyer stores in Portland sell the same Top Pot-branded donuts as QFC does in Seattle.) I haven't tried much from Fred Meyer's bakery, but I've had mixed results -- they used to have some very good fancier items in the bakery service case (if you could actually find an employee to get them for you), but those cases have been removed in recent remodels, and I haven't been thrilled with most of the things I've tried from their bakery otherwise. From your description, I'm guessing Randall's bakery is similar to Safeway's before they went downhill, while Fred Meyer's is probably about the same as Kroger.
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