8 Most Beloved Costco Bakery Items Of All Time

Whether you need the best prepared foods to make mealtimes a little easier or you just want to stock up on affordable sweet treats, you can always rely on Costco for its range of delicious food items. There's a little bit of everything in those enormous warehouses — you could explore the whole building and still discover new items, even if you've been a member for decades. However, if there's one part of the retailer that we never fail to browse, it's the bakery. So, in honor of our favorite section, we set out to find the most beloved Costco bakery items... ever.

To compile the most adored Costco bakery items of all time — past and present — we scoured the internet, perusing customer reviews, food blogs, and old Tasting Table articles. We also took into account our own expansive expertise as long-term Costco members. There's a good chance that some of these treats are already on your list of personal favorites, and a few might be blasts from the past that you've been wishing would return. These are truly the best baked goods Costco has ever offered based on their flavor, versatility, and value.

Costco veterans are well aware that the store's croissants are a must-buy, and new members should definitely give them a try on their next visit. Nobody's claiming they're indistinguishable from the croissants you'd find at an authentic French bakery, but they are still excellent quality for store-bought pastries. They're rich, buttery, flaky, and pillowy soft, but they're also easy to cut in half if you want to use them for breakfast sandwiches.

There are numerous Reddit threads dedicated to Costco's croissants, with dozens of users chiming in to declare their love for the treat. Many folks note how versatile Costco's croissants are, with one commenter using them to create their own almond croissants, and another using them to put a decadent spin on avocado toast. 

If you have a large family to feed, it's easy to run through a box of these while they're fresh, but if you're not sure you can finish them promptly, people also say they freeze well and can be easily reheated. One impatient Redditor even claims to eat them straight from the freezer. Best of all, an entire 12-pack of Costco croissants costs about the same as a single croissant from an authentic French patisserie.

Our first discontinued item on the list, Costco's French toast muffins were a cult favorite that members consistently bring up when discussing the retailer's long-lost bakery items. While they've been gone for years, these muffins are fondly remembered by many who loved them and didn't care about their lack of nutritional value.

These muffins were pure bliss thanks to their rich cinnamon flavor, scrumptious icing and streusel topping, and what appeared to be rich, gooey pockets of... something. Cinnamon sugar, perhaps? One Redditor called them the "Best thing Costco bakery ever made," when someone raised the topic of these cherished muffins. Others say they're the discontinued Costco product they miss the most. It's hard to find a lot of information about these muffins, as they were discontinued nearly a decade ago, but it's clear they were a highly coveted bakery item since people are still talking about them to this day.

Chocolate chip cookies are a classic bakery treat, and Costco's offer the perfect blend of buttery cookie dough and rich chocolate chunks. If you like soft cookies with a slightly crisp edge, these are fantastic fresh. If you prefer a firmer cookie, simply wait before tucking in — unlike some baked goods, these still taste incredible after a couple of days. Sold in packs of 24, they're an easy crowd-pleaser, and they're Tasting Table's favorite Costco bakery cookies.

"They are exactly what I want in a chocolate chip cookie," says the Redditor who made a thread dedicated to these treats. "The perfect mix of chewy and chocolate. I eat one and my brain starts itching and trying to negotiate for one more."  Many even consider them to taste better than those you get from national cookie chains. It appears that the biggest issue people seem to have with these chocolate chip cookies is that it takes a huge amount of willpower to stop at just one.

Costco's now-discontinued All-American cake was about as indulgent and chocolatey as a gateau could get: chocolate on chocolate with — wait for it — more chocolate. One Redditor describes the cake in full detail: "Several layers of rich chocolate cake with gobs of glimmering chocolate frosting between them. Covered with an embarrassing amount of dark chocolate frosting and decorated with chocolate shavings." People still talk about it years after it left the shelves, and some fans have even gone as far as launching a Change.org petition to bring it back.

Plenty of folks reminisce about how they used to request the All-American cake for their birthday, year after year, and share how disappointed they were to learn that Costco no longer made it. "This was literally the greatest chocolate cake ever made," one Redditor laments. Costco recently sold a chocolate fudge cake which took first place in our store-bought bakery chocolate cake ranking, and some fans claim it was made using the same recipe as the All-American cake, albeit without the chocolate shavings. Unfortunately for chocolate lovers, that cake seems to have disappeared from the Costco bakery, too.

If you want a less indulgent bakery item, you might want to score some of Costco's cranberry walnut bread, found with the other freshly baked loaves. The rustic, hearty wholegrain bread looks like something your grandma would make, or perhaps a loaf you'd find at a farmer's market. It's wonderfully balanced with its sweet and tart cranberries and smattering of crunchy walnuts. And while one could easily assume this is a seasonal item, you can actually buy it year-round at Costco. 

People love this loaf, with numerous folks calling it their bread of choice, and some even saying it's their favorite feature of the Costco bakery. It doesn't hurt that there is no shortage of ways to eat it. You can use it to make French toast, or eat it toasted with butter and honey. It also tastes great fresh, whether you want to pair it with a nice Brie, or you simply tear off a chunk of the warm bread as soon as you get back to your car. According to Costco members on Reddit, this bread stores well in the freezer if you slice it beforehand — some people like to buy multiple loaves at once, especially if they're on sale.

Plenty of people fondly reminisce about Costco's apple crumb muffins. Whereas many apple-based treats only feature artificial flavoring, these contained actual fruit. Customers say they used to be obsessed with these baked treats, and that the real apple pieces truly made them stand out. They also boasted a deliciously enticing crumb topping, so the blend of flavor and texture was unparalleled.

Costco members say that they'd do anything for Costco to sell these muffins again. They were considered pretty popular at the time, so it's surprising that they left in the first place. "Those were a taste of heaven ... Now I'm drooling," said one fan on Reddit. With so many people clamoring for their return, we hope to see them back on the bakery floor one of these days. In the meantime, you'll just have to try making our apple pecan muffins with cinnamon crumble instead.

Costco's Boston cream pie is another beloved baked product that plenty of people loved and feel was gone too soon. The bakery favorite featured layers of soft sponge and pastry cream with a gooey chocolate ganache layer on top.

There have been countless requests for the return of this rich, chocolatey cake over the years, but it's been gone for so long, we're not sure it'll ever happen. Still, we can dream. People regularly seek out copycat recipes, but it seems that nobody has managed to perfectly recreate the magic of the original. Truthfully, we couldn't find a lot of information about Costco's Boston cream pie — besides people mourning its loss — so it's tricky to figure out what made it so special compared to other recipes. That said, we feel this decadent Boston cream pie recipe might help fill the void while we hope for a return of Costco's version.

One baked treat we probably don't have to worry about disappearing any time soon is Costco's Tuxedo chocolate mousse cake. It looks and tastes just like something you would get at a fancy bakery, not your local Costco. It features layers of chocolate cake, milk and white chocolate mousse, and there are some brownie bites thrown in for good measure. It's topped off with decadent chocolate ganache and chocolate decorations — it certainly never feels one-note.

This cake is truly cherished by Costco customers, and you'll find no shortage of people talking about it online, shouting from the rooftops how much they love it. It's also Tasting Table's top-ranking Costco cake. People say it's one of the best-tasting cakes of all time, and some even like to serve it with fresh fruit for a flavor and texture boost that also adds a vibrant pop of color.

To create this list, we started by looking through previous Tasting Table reviews and rankings of Costco bakery items to identify the items people loved the most. We also turned to Reddit to see what Costco members had to say about the items they love. For an item to make our list, public opinion had to be overwhelmingly positive, with plenty of people saying it was an amazing product based on flavor and value. If an item was discontinued, we looked to see how strongly people missed it, and whether customers were calling for its return.