Groceries

[tfabris]

Anyone know of a grocery store chain in the Seattle area that carries these exact brands, flavors, and quantities of the following three products simultaneously in the same store?



The Albertson's near my house does in fact carry the knudsen stuff, however, their supplier refresh rate is TERRIBLE. I often go there and find that its expiration date is either past due, or it's coming up in a day or two. That stuff should have a lead-time of at least a week or two. Near the end of January, I bought a tub of the stuff dated Feb 2nd, then returned 7 days later to get more, and found the stuff on the shelf was still dated Feb 2nd (which was by then only a day or two off).

Looked at a number of other local places, and while stores often carry the snapple (unlike my Albertsons), that Knudsen stuff is as rare as a bag full of rare things.

Comments

[callibr8]

Does Knudsen have a website? Sometimes those contain useful links to distribution points. Also, I believe that QFC carries the Knudsen, and there should be one of those not too far from your regular stomping grounds. Generally I see the peach diet snapple in lots of places, the cran/rasp less so - though I think that Safeway carries both.

I know, not all-in-one, but figure it might help anyway...

[tfabris.livejournal.com]

I thought QFC was one of the places I checked out recently, but I wasn't sure and it might have been a different place. I will try again. It was already on my short list of places to try.

Knudsen is a division of Kraft foods, and I already tried emailing them directly. Their answer was that they couldn't give me any information about which individual stores or distributors carried which products.

I have tried to ask the staff at Albertson's who their distributor is for that product, so I could find what other stores that distributor services, but no luck there either.

[damiana-swan.livejournal.com]

Hmm ... safeway.com's online store (which delivers here to MSFT) seems to have the cottage cheese and the diet peach Snapple, but not the diet cran/rasberry. Oddly enough, albertsons.com (which also delivers here to MSFT from their Issaquah store) also has those two items but not the third. If you like, I could get you the store phone#--we've ordered from them for parties for years now, and if they have the cran/rasberry in stock, they could almost certainly make a "custom" order for you, that you could repeat as needed. That would also be a good way to get them to check the expiration date on the cottage cheese.

[jhitchin.livejournal.com]

Now I know what to bring to a housefilk when I can find them. :-)

[tfabris.livejournal.com]

I've been to multiple safeway stores in the area, and none of them ever carry the knudsen's.

I can always get the snapples I want at Safeway, but what I'm looking for is a single store near my house that can be my regular haunt because it always carries my particular favorites.

[djonn]

Portlander chiming in:

I suspect this is a losing battle -- having prowled a lot of supermarkets over the years, my sense is that where fresh dairy products are concerned, most stores concentrate chiefly on (a) their private-label brands, and (b) one or two prominent local/regional brands. As a national-brand label, Knudsen is going to be no higher than third tier in competing for shelf space.

That said, what you might do is try to find out what local dairy has the license to produce and package the Knudsen product -- and then what other licenses that dairy has, most particularly for local store brands. It's likely that whoever's producing the Knudsen product for the Seattle market is also supplying at least one major store brand cottage cheese locally, if not several, and one or another of those may turn out to be close enough to the Knudsen formula to serve as a substitute.

Meanwhile, for local prospecting purposes:

I've noted that product selection can vary from store to store within a chain, especially depending on store size -- the Safeway just down the street from me is an older, smaller store, and doesn't have everything that some of the newer, larger Safeways in the area carry. This is going to be especially true of the fresh-food sections (produce, meat, bakery, deli, dairy). For your purposes, the bigger the store, the likelier it may be to have shelf space for Knudsen cottage cheese.

I don't think I've seen the Knudsen brand in Fred Meyer, but I don't pay a lot of attention to cottage cheese, and if QFC is carrying it, Freddy's might also (both being Kroger satellites nowadays).

If the nearest Haggen is not unreasonably far north (which it may well be; I'd thought they had better penetration into Seattle proper), they may be worth investigating; like QFC, they have a slightly gourmet-centric marketing strategy. On the flip side, if the nearest WinCo is not unreasonably far south (also very possible, unfortunately), they're likely worth trying -- the range of brands they offer is distinctly different from everyone else I'm aware of in the Portland market; they have all manner of products I don't see anywhere else.