Think Twice Before Buying Whole Foods' Take On This Italian Cake

Strong coffee, creamy mascarpone, fluffy sponge cake — you would think it's hard to go wrong with this classic Italian dessert. As it turns out, there are many mistakes one can make with a tiramisu, and a great example of this is Whole Foods' take on the popular Italian cake. Tasting Table ran a taste test on popular cake slices sold at one of America's biggest supermarket chains, the tiramisu from Whole Foods sat firmly in the skip category when we wrote about seven Whole Foods cake slices to buy and six to skip.

"Part of what makes a tiramisu delicious is the layers of flavors and textures," our writer noted, adding that the Whole Foods version had none of that. "It was so, so bitter — like you had just spilled your coffee on a cake. There was no milky sweetness from the mascarpone because there was no mascarpone at all. Instead, there was a whipped cream-like filling, which kept things very mushy on the texture front."

The ingredients list on the box does mention mascarpone (as well as something simply called "bioengineered food ingredient"), there clearly wasn't enough of it in there to register on the taste buds. "Anyone who knows about the original tiramisu recipe knows that mascarpone is heavily featured. In this recipe, there was no tangy cheese or notes of cocoa, just bitter coffee and airy whip," they wrote. 

The lack of generosity with the mascarpone impacts the balance of the tiramisu cake, according to some customers. "I'll be honest, it's not the best tiramisu I have had," one TikTok user said. "There's a very strong coffee flavor. There's cream. There's not enough sugar in it. It's not sweet at all. If you don't like coffee you're not going to like the Whole Foods tiramisu."

On the other hand, the cake does seem to go down better with coffee lovers. "There's a good layer of cream and ladyfingers and coffee. I was impressed," a fan said on TikTok. "There's a good coffee flavor." While cream is commonly featured in many modern versions of the dessert, the original tiramisu recipe didn't have any heavy cream.

Meanwhile, long-time Whole Foods customers insist the tiramisu cake tasted much better before a recipe change in 2024. "The tiramisu recipe changed. It doesn't taste as good as the one before," they wrote on Reddit, adding, "I wish people would stop buying it so they just bring back the old recipe. The old recipe looks messier and has more cream/ mascarpone while the new one looks neater and has more sponge cake."