Yes! Walking into a grocery store is one of the best things about traveling. It is one of the few genuine everyday activities that are easily available to a tourist, but is going to be quite different to what you’re used to from home, sometimes in surprising ways.
Hopefully this will not disappear entirely as brands and chains become more and more homogenized across the world. One of the saddest examples of this is how nearly every brand of ice cream in Europe became part of Unilever’s ugly “Heartbrand” in the late ‘90s. Now anywhere you go, you will just be offered the same Magnum, Solero, Cornetto. Who wants to take a vacation photo eating an ice cream you could find in your local store at home?
I recall being in a tiny store in Lourdes, France and seeing packets of Tim Tams for sale (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tim_Tam). It was the last thing I expected to see from home (Oz). Of course, I bought a pack and thought of home...
One of my favorite memories of traveling in Spain is just doing that, and finding so many 30-35 cent canned beer being sold individually. Cheaper than water.
> [...] nearly every brand of ice cream in Europe became part of Unilever’s ugly “Heartbrand” in the late ‘90s. Now anywhere you go, you will just be offered the same Magnum, Solero, Cornetto
This is true, but a bit of an exaggeration.
In the UK and Scandinavia, many small dairies are producing nice ice creams which you can buy in regular supermarkets.
In fact, a favorite thing of mine is trying to find said ice creams without any gelling agents (carrageenan, gum, etc.) which are really harsh to gut biota. There are quite a few.
Latin America too. Interestingly, each country has it's own name, often the name of an old-time ice cream company that has since went out of business. In the US it is "Good Humor."
Took me a few years during my backpacking days to figure it out. While odd, I never thought of it as "ugly."
I was in Churchill Manitoba in November one year - it was -30C outside. The local store had an ice cream freezer with the Good Humor branding on it. It seemed very appropriate. Outside the window you could see frozen Hudson Bay stretching to the horizon.
They also had a banner outside the store saying "Stock up before the cold comes."
Same with crisps/potato chips. You'll get 'Lays' or 'Frito Lays' or whatever everywhere, but in the UK it's 'Walkers'.
Whole bags of microscopically thin slices of deep fried potato, loaded with salt or sugar in some form or another.
Of course, you get the fake antique alternatives to attract the millennial crowd too. e.g. Old Mout Cider claims to be 70 years old but is just a hipster offshoot of Bulmer's, with a carefully crafted narrative and bizarrely appealing design for a hitherto unknown drink, customer support hotlines and all.
There's a lot of amazing local stuff you can find when you're not in mass-market brand outlets.
Only parts of the U.S. I've lived in Florida, Arkansas, Mississippi, Texas, California, and Virginia, and I don't think I've ever had Good Humor. Mostly Blue Bell.
I never even knew there was a dominant ice cream brand, and if you asked me to name it, I would have picked Hersheys. I have lots of different ice cream options at my grocery store, and some are going the “all natural, 4 ingredient” route as well. Plus it seems like every small town has a dairy/local ice cream shop it feels like.
I really like to see the differences in flavors of common snacks. These triple-onion potato chips in Sweden (something I feel like I'd never see in the US) were very good: https://imgur.com/a/nx3cTCI
I've been telling friends and family this for years. It's by far my favorite thing to see in a new city in a region I've never been before. It's sort of like a modern anthropological exhibit in more ways than any other single city structure.
There was a photography coffee table book I loved, where the artist took pictures of an entire family around their table, which had all of the food they ate for a week on it.
I've since forgotten the name of the book (if anyone knows it please tell me -- search isn't turning up much), but grocery stores feel like as close as a regular tourist can get to those personal scenes.
What’s amazing about that is the unnecessary or excessive packaging becomes evident.
Underdeveloped nations haven’t yet gotten in the bad habit of wrapping everything in plastic. Grains are in reused sacks, meat is straight from the butcher. I mean, sure I get egg cases and wrapped meats. But some places put vegetables and fruits in styropacks.... why?
> It's sort of like a modern anthropological exhibit in more ways than any other single city structure.
I seem to mainly recall the negative experiences.
In Rome, on vacation, I remember a grocery store where there were only two cashier lanes open, and long lines, and the two cashiers were facing each other, just havin' a five-minute chat about something unrelated to their work. This might have been an unusual event, since I've never lived in Italy.
In Portugal, where I lived several years, you're just out of luck. The cashiers are as slow as molasses. Also, one particular major chain seemed to have this weird occurrence of always looking ransacked and constantly being restocked during every one of their opening hours. And the "we're opening a new lane" thing wasn't "next person in current line is first in the new line". It would be a free-for-all, especially for newcomers.
In Netherlands, a major chain in Amsterdam would only take cash or a Dutch credit card. Visa/Mastercard from elsewhere were not accepted forms of payment.
> In Netherlands, a major chain in Amsterdam would only take cash or a Dutch credit card. Visa/Mastercard from elsewhere were not accepted forms of payment.
Same experience just recently -- Albert Heijn. You'll find this grocery story every 50 meters in a major city like Amsterdam. No credit cards. It was pretty odd to me as a Canadian.
Yep. I had to leave everything I had just gone through the store to pick out. I prefer Albert Heijn for their selection but shopped at Lidl cause they'd take my cards.
I just moved back home to New Orleans after twenty-something years in various other corners of the US, and seeing the aisle of local products is both disorienting and familiar. There’s a few brands with pro-looking graphic design, a few of which have made it out of the state (you can buy Zararain’s stuff elsewhere, for instance), and a lot of brands you’ve never heard of outside Louisiana with labels that look designed by the owner’s cousin who has the Adobe suite.
The stuff with the amateurish labels is inevitably the best. It’s not packed with preservatives and stretchers and all the other crap you have to adulterate your food with to be able to ship it across the country and have it be shelf-stable.
There’s other surprises around the grocery store, but the feeling’s most intense in the Local Seasonings Aisle at the local Rouse’s.
Spanish grocery stores are incredible, you really get a feel for the tapas culture. Everyone stops by after work just to get their late afternoon meal/snack and breakfast for tomorrow. You can't go wrong with any of the <7€ wines, and the salami and cheese selection is superb too.
I was in Kyoto a few months ago, and wandering through the Kyoto Co-op grocery was super fun. So many kinds of green tea I had never heard of, and again, there's a sense of the Japanese minimalist cooking culture. Almost no one in Japan owns an oven, and most places I've seen just have 1-2 standalone electric burners, so baking either isn't done or it'll be something small in a toaster oven.
I love grocery shopping in general, but if you're abroad I'd highly recommend checking out local grocery stores.
If you're in Tokyo (Taito City), go see Kappabashi Dogu-gai or Chef's Street. It has an amazing collection of cookware, dining sets, chairs, signs, place mats, cooking knives, and plastic food.
I'm not in a position to do much traveling right now, but I get my kicks visiting small foreign markets here in the United States. Some things you can't get anywhere else, and it's always fun to see what things are considered Staples for different cultures. For example, I have found that the Russian markets have the best pickles and bread, and the Vietnamese markets have an awesome deli and really good produce, and there's a Caribbean market near my house that carries Ting, which is my favorite grapefruit soda.
I buy all my spices from regional markets. There's a Halal market west of my girlfriend's place which is where I buy my fenugreek and olive oil because his prices per gallon are very reasonable, and he actually stocks fenugreek unlike every single other store I've been to in the area. And if I need MSG I go to the asian market because I can buy it for $2.00/lb.
Indeed--there's a halal market I just discovered today that has the most reasonably priced semolina and spices I've seen. Ignorant me believed that semolina came only from large retailers or specialty Italian shops (i.e. sellers of expensive cheese and wine).
Libraries are also a good way to tour a city. Get a transit card from a grocery store or a convenient store (also a lotto ticket because you never know).
Start with the main branch, then on to the various neighborhood branches. It’s important to pick a section you are interested in beforehand. Fiction might be too overwhelming, so I’d go for the math or computer technology sections.
Once you’ve done this in multiple cities you can compare the sizes of those sections between different cities and how current the books are, i.e, for tech books, do they have books on the latest trend in programming languages.
Go to coffee shops and bakeries in between. I can usually squeeze in the main branch and one or two neighborhood branches in a day. Research the city to figure out which neighborhood libraries to go.
I'd add for Brazil, a great alternative to the libraries are SESCs. SESCs are cultural centers, funded by a payroll tax proposed by big business in the 50s when they were afraid of Communist sympathies in population. The result are extremely well funded community centers with big arts budgets for free exhibitions, exercise facilities, primary care clinics, libraries, cafeterias with affordable food and lots of space for people to lounge around. In many neighborhoods, they're the epicenter of social life. They've been a terrific way to break out of the downtown Sao Paulo bubble.
When people go to China for the first time I always recommend that they go walk through a Walmart there precisely for the reason that it is a friendly and familiar place, but also highlights just how different the food culture is in that country vs. at home. I'm pretty sure it was the only piece of tourism advise my Chinese colleague gave me when I went for the first time, and I've passed it on ever since.
When I land in a new city, I spend the first day with no plan, just wandering about. It's surprising how much of a feel you can get for the texture of daily life in a city by doing this.
From my perspective, food and all the rituals and customs around it are some of the richest parts of culture, so I also like to go to grocery stores like this article covers. Another half-day is dedicated to a food tour, which is a fantastic way to learn about a new culture. In my experience, often the tour guides have lived in that culture for many years but they're not originally from there, so they can do cross-cultural translation for you, pointing out things you might not expect. And the best tours also include walking around the city and seeing cultural highlights.
I recall a work trip to a conference in Anaheim (California, US, right outside of LA but still in the metro area). It was my first real work trip and I was disappointed because I wasn't seeing very much of Anaheim outside of the more tourist-y stuff, as the area around the conference center/hotel was one giant tourist trap. So, I ended up at the local Target at around 9am, and I'm really glad I did, because I felt like I was seeing a more real part of the city than the rest of the time combined.
When I visit a foreign country I always make sure I go to a junkyard (preferably a self service one) and buy something. You tend to have very "authentic" interactions with the locals in that kind of setting. It makes for great stories that simultaneously allow you to brag to your coworkers about how "authentic" (or whatever) your tourism experience was while also making them uncomfortable. 10/10, highly recommend.
I wandered around a thrift store in Bern once and found some weird secondhand stuff -- mannequins apparently for sale, fur stoles, mattresses, chandeliers, clocks galore, oil paintings, dress shoes, model trains, china, flasks, buttons, yarn -- all piled high, priced about 50% of what you might pay in a retail store (which is still very expensive), and sold in what looked like a very large single-family house in the middle of a quiet residential neighborhood that had been somehow emptied out and turned into three rambling stories of loosely scattered miscellany.
Reviewing the map now, apparently just down the street at 24 Pappelweg there was an even bigger, more commercialized thrift-store operation, a Barner Brocki Plus, which might have had what I was actually looking for (a men's coat). Oops.
At least I got to read the local news and find out that, yes, their version of the American thrift store is a bit different and a bit pricier (e.g. https://www.derbund.ch/bern/stadt/brockenhaeuser-sind-zwar-s... ), which was an interesting way to learn a new culture.
>Ironically I also love going to foreign McDonalds.
I make a point of getting a McDonalds cheeseburger in every country I visit. Austria has the best meat (Germany the worst). Poland tasted like Australia (my home) and the UK burger was the most plastic like. Italy, UAE, and Hong Kong all deviate quite a bit from the "regular" menu but I visited the latter two at the airport so maybe they are outliers.
Funny because McDonald’s is now featuring items here in the US that are popular overseas. Currently they are featuring a Grand McExtreme Bacon Burger from Spain and a Stroopwaffel McFlurry from the Netherlands.
The McCroquettas and patatas bravas in Spain are my latest favorite.
And since McDonald's adapted their breakfast menu to the Middle East a few years ago I'm still astonished by how closely they managed to make their chicken-based ham taste like real pork ham.
It's also weird to see lots of "vices" (beer, cigarettes, condoms, etc) in vending machines on the street. Like, when I was in Italy I saw kids buying beer and cigarettes and no one seemed to care!
If you are interested in more genuine experiences in the countries you visit I recommend learning at least 100 words in the local language. It's a pretty low bar, but it will take you a long way! Some of my most memorable holiday moments have been over some fumbled german or trying to build a sentence out of my very limited Japanese vocab.
To answer the mystery from the first paragraph the author leaves hanging, the avocado in question was probably a B-cultivar, either Florida avocado, Fuerte avocado, or Monroe avocado.
Honestly, I don't understand how the US doesn't get any of the good chocolate bars: Coffee Crisp, Crispy Crunch, Eat More, Wunderbar, Smarties (not the chalky candies, those are Rockets), and Aero.
I'm glad I'm not alone in this! you can tell so much from a grocery store, and it's something I always do. People commented that It's odd, but nothing is better than local selection and too many people really value "experience" over price.
I don't care if you can get the same item from the company in it's fancy downtown store, or a few blocks away at the grocery store. It don't really matter and becomes a tourist trap.
Sadly, this doesn't apply to America. Our grocery stores are very much homogenized, and in many parts of the country the only grocery store will be Walmart. Urban areas will have higher end chains that stock a wider variety and some foreign and independent stores with unique selections, but once you get past the cities and into rural America, your options for groceries are about the same from town to town.
I've been making it a point to visit grocery stores in every country I visit for the last 10 years. I tend to agree with you that grocery stores tend become homogenized within a country (and not just in the US), but there's always a lot of variation between countries.
You'll probably find this strange, but as a foreigner, I was really excited to see Walmart for the first time, and I found it just as interesting as visiting grocery stores in other countries.
There are things there that just seem comically American - like there's a McDonald's inside a supermarket! And there's a section where you can pick up guns and ammo while you're buying milk and eggs!
The chocolates section contains the same products as every other store across North America, but I'd never seen any of these while growing up in Australia, so we picked up a lot of these. Even basic things like bread taste different from back home.
Other stores are interesting in different ways. The size and scale of Costco is insane. Whole Foods and Trader Joe's carry different brands of everything, so it feels very different shopping there.
I'm really looking forward to my next visit to the States, and picking up the bacon flavored popcorn from Trader Joe's. I've never seen this anywhere else in the world, and it's as awesome as it sounds :)
The towns of ~10,000 that I know that have Walmarts have multiple competitors to the Walmart, and smaller towns don't have the Walmart but may have a local grocer.
I know of "towns" that are the ~4th largest city in the state. Their economy is tourism based calling themselves a town and having a town style government fits their brand image better.
In the U.S. eggs are washed and refrigerated. You find them at the back of the grocery near the dairy. (Unless you get them at s farmers market or roadside stand.)
I can imagine this is great for people who don't have deadly food allergies. For me, navigating foreign grocery stores has become so filled with anxiety, doubly so in a country where you don't know the language.
Whenever I'm in a new country or region, I always make a point to go to the grocery store and the McDonalds. Both tend to have unique items that you can't find anywhere else.
> East Palo Alto has only one, and struggled for years without a grocery store or bank.
I understand that it's an independent polity, but it's also surrounded by other urban areas.
I can get a 51 minute bus ride from an apartment complex in East Palo Alto to a Safeway, which does cost about $5 but that's a discussion for another day; my point is, East Palo Alto only has "one grocery store" if you ignore everything surrounding it.
An hour's bus ride (assuming you catch the schedule right) each way is pretty ruinous for someone working long hours or with kids to look after. I think it hardly counts as "local".
Sounds really bad having to go by bus for an hour, I have 2-10 stores within walking distance (3-35 minutes), in a similarly sized and populated area. It would be really interesting understanding why there are no stores in some areas.
Not a sufficient amount of profit to be made. Could be lack of sufficient number of customers to offset cost of developing a store (most likely), or zoning and permitting issues making it difficult to obtain the legal rights to open one.
Many people prefer only going to the big stores, such as Target and Costco and other large regional or nationwide companies, so not much room left for independent owners unless they’re in a very dense area where there’s enough people wanting to go to their smaller stores.
There's only one real grocery store (Mi Tierra Linda) on the east side of 101, and the other side of 101 is mostly residential. You don't get much more shopping until you get close to El Camino, and most of the grocery stores you'll find there (like the Whole Foods near the Palo Alto train station) are targeting a much more upscale market.
Depends on how you define "city", but one city I lived in only has one grocery store now; it has a population under 10,000, so whether you call that a "city" is up to you.
Hopefully this will not disappear entirely as brands and chains become more and more homogenized across the world. One of the saddest examples of this is how nearly every brand of ice cream in Europe became part of Unilever’s ugly “Heartbrand” in the late ‘90s. Now anywhere you go, you will just be offered the same Magnum, Solero, Cornetto. Who wants to take a vacation photo eating an ice cream you could find in your local store at home?