Costco Customers Aren't Happy With The New Brand Behind Kirkland Signature Tortilla Chips

Costco is known for a lot more than just bulk-sized products and mountains of free samples — and yes, you can ask for more than one free sample. The Kirkland Signature brand is one of the main draws to the store, offering customers quality items at a fraction of the price, although it's important to note that it isn't just a cheaper knockoff brand. Despite the Kirkland Signature logo, many items you pick up on a Costco run were created by brands you already know and love.

Kirkland Signature's tortilla strips are manufactured by the Mission Foods brand, or at least, they were for a time. Many bags in stores and on the Costco website display the red bell from the Mission logo on the front, along with tiny print that reads "manufactured by." Recently, eagle-eyed customers on Reddit noticed that new bags of the Kirkland Signature tortilla strips no longer have the Mission logo, which is confirmed with a separate listing on Costco's website for the product. The "new bag looks identical but no longer says it's manufactured by Mission," said the Reddit user, while another Redditor piped up that they managed to grab an old bag "right before the changes" made it to their particular store. There's no official confirmation of the switch, but Reddit seems to believe that the newer, unmarked Kirkland Signature tortilla strip bags are slowly replacing the manufactured-by-Mission bags.

Mission Foods brand is owned by The Gruma Corporation, which began in 1949 in Cerralvo, Nuevo León, Mexico. By 1977, The Gruma Corporation acquired the Mission tortilla factory and expanded its portfolio of tortilla-based products. Twelve years later, Mission Foods expanded to 10 factories in the U.S., creating an entire line of authentic Mexican products. According to the company's website, Mission Foods is "the #1 tortilla company in the U.S.," responsible for making not only Kirkland Signature's tortilla strips, but also its own line of flour tortillas, tortilla chips, flatbreads, and chicharrones.

Mission sells its own tortilla strips (though not at Costco stores), which some fans on Reddit claim taste better than the ones the brand manufactured for Kirkland Signature. "I honestly didn't think the Costco Mission version was as good as the normal Mission branded [tortilla strips] from any grocery store," said one Redditor, not necessarily mourning the potential manufacturer change at Costco.

Another customer on Reddit broke down how even though the two had the "same plastic package material and same ingredients," there were differences between chip thickness, sodium levels, and type of oil. The same Redditor said that the Kirkland Signature tortilla strips may be "one of the few times the Kirkland product isn't as good as the branded product."

In the meantime, here are 21 other Kirkland Signature items you can stock up on for summer cookouts.