The Costco Brand Dried Fruit And Nut Mix That Shoppers Want Back

People are loyal to many products at Costco. Take, for instance, its iconic hot dog, which inspires no small amount of brand loyalty and moves more units than the entire MLB combined. There is also no shortage of partisans for the top-flight booze it offers at reasonable prices. So, when Costco decides to 86 an item, you can almost guarantee there is going to be some blowback, especially when it is a singular item that isn't replicated often.

The Fruit & Nut Medley that the big box, membership-based store used to offer was not your average blend. It contained an impressively broad array of items, including peanuts, almonds, walnuts, apples, kiwi, mangoes, papaya, pineapples, strawberries, bananas, cherries, and golden raisins. The dried fruits were left in large chunks that were bolstered by the rich tree nuts and single legume that studded the bag. On one spirited r/Costco thread, Redditors reminisced about how delicious the pineapple chunks were and lauded the utility of the large bag in fueling late night gaming sessions. There are also several who offer up pleas to the Costco powers-that-be to bring back the winning combination of relatively healthy snack morsels.

With such a vociferous outcall for the return of the Fruit & Nut Medley, one wonders why Costco ever did away with it in the first place. The company has released no official reason, but an aggregate of reports online of customers not being able to find it place the item's disappearance from Costco shelves as early as 2014. 

A purely speculative reason for the product being dropped may have something to do with Costco's pricing system. While the company isn't exactly forthcoming with how they arrive at their prices, it is known that they strive to keep them low, with myriad factors impacting its decision-making. Agricultural products, especially those sourced from overseas, as parts of the Fruit & Nut Medley were, can have volatile shifts in price due to climate conditions, supply chains, and the vagaries of global trade. It's anyone's guess, but it might be that this product saw too much price fluctuation for Costco to keep it stocked.

If it's any consolation to those who miss the Fruit & Nut Medley, online vendor Nuts.com does offer a version that features "nearly every dried fruit delight under the sun: from papaya to cherries, mangoes to whole strawberries, plus bananas, raisins, pineapple and whole slices of killer dried kiwi" as well as "roasted almonds, peanuts and whole, raw walnuts."