I Tried And Ranked Chocolate Chip Cookies From 10 Grocery Store Bakeries

The chocolate chip cookie is often taken for granted. Seen as the safe bet on the cookie tray, it feels like a comforting option where all variables are known: chocolate and brown sugar, a base dough with a caramel-like sweetness, and it pairs naturally with milk. But beyond these select hallmarks, there's a world of diversity. 

Think of the various chocolate chip cookies offered by grocery store bakeries. Some lean into the bigger is better philosophy, while others find it's all about producing a large quantity of cookies with uniform looks and flavor. Still others seem to think using the most exotic and luxurious ingredients make for the superior chocolate chip cookie. Many grocery store bakeries add to the confusion by offering multiple chocolate chip cookie varieties, from vegan options to artisanal lines. Even with a heavily saturated cookie market, there are some delightful gems to be found from your nearby grocery store. 

I went to 10 different grocery stores to find these very gems. True, evaluating chocolate chip cookies can get a bit dicey. Everybody wants a little something different from their CCC, be it a thin and crispy texture or a molten, gooey center. But a good cookie can be identified by quality and flavor above all else. Without further ado, let's find out how these many cookies crumbled.   

Walmart had two main chocolate chip cookies on offer, one from the Freshness Guaranteed brand and one from Marketside brand. The brands seem to be distinguished by a slight elevation in price point and quality when looking at Marketside. For instance, a 13.5-ounce pack of the Marketside Decadent Chocolate Chunk Cookies is $5.44 while the 14-ounce pack of Freshness Guaranteed Chocolate Chip Cookies goes for $3.84. Either way, the main difference between the two cookies can be easily discerned by the naked eye, with Marketside looking golden and sporting chocolate chunks and the Freshness Guaranteed a paler shade and packing chips. It gives customers the sense that they can choose between a more artisan treat and a classic, any-time comfort. 

Surprisingly, I enjoyed the Freshness Guaranteed option more than the super-charged Marketside one because of the chocolate choice. Marketside made the mistake many chocolate chip cookies make, thinking more bitter dark chocolate will make for a more sophisticated cookie. In reality, it just ends up overpowering all the other pleasant flavors. But neither cookie really delivered top-tier flavor. Also, both were super soft like Play-Doh — basically, a suspicious chemical softness. While neither cookie was inedible by any stretch, both had the same bland, numbing effect on my palate. Generically sweet, I could have been eating any cookie, with only the random bits of chocolate reminding me what kind of cookie it was. Chocolate chip cookies deserve better than that.

Target only offered one type of chocolate chip cookie from the store's snack and dessert brand, Favorite Day. Though the brand rolled out in 2021, Favorite Day has already racked up some serious hits in the baked good department. Of course, there have been a few misses — looking at you, old-fashioned cake doughnuts — but I'm usually pretty pleased with Target's quality. 

Judging by looks alone, I would have thought these cookies would taste weird. The yellow hue and craggy, dry surface made me think of some protein, egg-free, gluten-free, joy-free cookies I made with chickpea flour. In this instance, looks were not deceiving. These tasted like a weird, artificial take on the Tollhouse chocolate chip cookie. That's not a dig against the Tollhouse recipe — it's one of the best chocolate chip cookie recipes out there. But the way that Favorite Day distilled that signature flavor tastes distinctly chemical and fake. The chocolate wasn't too bitter, but it too had a kind of chemical taste to it. Add to that an arid, cakey texture that would choke anyone without a handy glass of milk nearby, and this is one of those cookies to desperately avoid if you've been tasked with bringing the cookies to the next get-together. 

Because of how well Sprouts recently did in my grocery store bakery apple pie review, I expected its cookies to bring a whole new level of refinement to the chocolate chip cookie game. I tried a vegan option and The Big Chunk Cookie, which proudly stated on its box that it was made with real butter, cage-free eggs, and 60% dark chocolate. 

To start off, The Big Chunk Cookie looked delicious and had some serious heft. The vegan one was a bit more anemic-looking, but it still looked alright. Tasting revealed the shortcomings to both. First, the vegan cookie had a bizarre corn-like flavor to the dough. A quick scan of the ingredient list showed that chickpea flour might be the culprit there. A vegan cookie already has enough working against it before you introduce a strange flavor like chickpea flour. 

But my true disappointment lay with The Big Chunk. This, like the Target cookies, was so cakey that it tripped over into dry territory. While I appreciated the dark chocolate flavor, the base cookie was too bland and couldn't balance the chocolate's slight bitterness. In some ways, the vegan cookie was more enjoyable to eat because of its texture and sweeter dough, but that's still faint praise. I may go to Sprouts for an apple pie, but I won't be splurging on the cookies. 

The Publix bakery does a lot of things really well. It offers fantastic baked-in-house bread, stellar bundt cakes, and perfectly moist pumpkin cupcakes. Heck, I'd go there for most store-bought baked goods, whether it was dinner rolls or a birthday cake. But even the greats have their weak spots, and I think Publix's might be in the chocolate chip cookie department. 

I tried Publix's traditional and vegan chocolate chip cookies. The vegan cookie was surprisingly good, and if you looked at them side by side with the regular cookies, you might think the labels were swapped. More deeply golden and with a better texture to boot, these vegan cookies blew Sprouts' version out of the water, and I highly recommend them if you're in need of an egg- and dairy-free option. However, the regular cookies were much more disappointing. They tasted like every generic, mid cookie I'd ever had distilled into one extra mid-package. If someone brought them to a party, you may eat a few out of compulsion, but you'd never feel satisfied. The death blow was the price tag: $7.19 for a baker's dozen. You can't serve me that kind of mediocrity at that inflated price point. 

The Fresh Market is to me what TJ Maxx is to other people: Bankruptcy masquerading as self-care. The products, particularly the made-in-house items, sing to me the most expensive of siren songs, and the chocolate chip cookies seemed to be no exception. On offer were the Chocolate Chunk Cookies and Rich's Giant Chocolate Chip Cookie. Both had an enticing appearance, boasting golden crusts and plenty of chocolate chips to go around. 

Taste-wise, the giant cookie was a standout, nailing a home-baked flavor and a texture that offered crispy edges and a chewy center. As just one cookie was $3.29, it needed to pack that kind of flavorful punch. The regular chocolate chop cookies were ... fine. The caramelization and texture were fairly good, but the chocolate was a bit bitter, and the cookie wasn't quite sweet enough to balance it out. You know what wasn't fine? The price. At $7.49 for eight cookies, that roughly cracks out to $1 per cookie. A so-so cookie can't cost that without it equating to highway robbery. Say what you will about the flavor of the Publix and Walmart cookies, but at least they didn't overcharge for the pleasure. Even though the giant cookie was a nice treat, there's a better jumbo cookie out there at a more affordable price. Ultimately, The Fresh Market's weighted average landed it in the bottom half of the ranking.  

Winn-Dixie is a Southern institution that's recently looked to incorporate some modern upgrades into its mom-and-pop style grocery store experience. One element of this modernization is a rehaul of the bakery section, which got a much-needed facelift as new stores open. With all this recent growth, I was looking forward to seeing how the chocolate chip cookies made out. I found two main cookies to try: a traditional Chocolate Chunk Cookie and the Gourmet Chocolate Chunk Cookie. 

The regular cookie had great caramel notes and a nice level of salt, an aspect that many chocolate chip cookies can take for granted. It wasn't as soft as I'd prefer, but the flavor was there. As for the gourmet-style cookies, these were the best of my "cakey" cookie options. It gave off Tollhouse vibes like the Target ones, but it lacked the artificial undertones. I'd say the cakey gourmet cookies edged out the regular ones by a hair, but both were fairly good cookies flavor-wise. They only had one small weakness: dryness. Still, these weren't as dry as the Target or Sprouts cookies. They had a much better flavor than the Publix cookies, and they were at a more affordable price point than The Fresh Market cookies. All in all, these are one of the best things to buy at Winn-Dixie. 

Like its spiritual cousin Trader Joe's, Aldi doesn't command the real estate or exhaustive product lineup that big stores like Walmart and Whole Foods do. Naturally, the discount grocery store only offered one true chocolate chip cookie. (Though it did have an interesting Frankenstein half chocolate-half chocolate chip cookie for the mega-chocolate lovers.) If you're only going to offer one type of chocolate chip cookie, it better be a good one. Luckily for Aldi, the Bake Shop Chocolate Chunk Cookies are a mighty fine product. 

I'd argue this plastic container of cookies handily beats the more expensive options from Sprouts, The Fresh Market, Publix, and Winn-Dixie. The chocolate nailed the balance of bitter and sweet, and the caramel, almost graham-cracker-like richness of the base dough was pleasant without being overpowering. Where this cookie really shines, though, is in that soft texture. Unlike the Play-Doh-like softness of the Walmart cookies, these truly have a softness that imitates a "fresh baked" treat. There are still a few cookies that beat it in flavor, but this is one of the more affordable options that won't disappoint. 

Like Sprouts and The Fresh Market, I tend to think of Whole Foods as one of those fantasy grocery stores where exotic food is offered for outrageous prices, but you're unable to resist because of the aesthetically pleasing atmosphere. Indeed, I found myself admiring cinnamon rolls, pastries, and pies in the baked goods section like I was in a real brick-and-mortar bakery, not a big chain grocery store. The Brown Butter Chocolate Chunk Cookies fit into this seductive line-up, immediately enticing me with their chocolate-laden, borderline fudgy appearance. I also tried the regular chocolate chip cookies, though they were slightly less gorgeous with an overly bronze crust. 

I had high hopes for the Brown Butter Chocolate Chunk Cookies and boy, did they deliver. A crispy shell gave way to a chewy interior absolutely brimming with rich chocolate chunks. Naturally, the nutty goodness of the brown butter enhanced every bite. It's gourmet in every sense of the word. The only thing that drags down the Whole Foods ranking a bit is the regular cookie. Though it's not bad, the stiff texture and slightly over-baked exterior made it feel a bit like a "why bother?" entry. Still, I have to hand it to Whole Foods for offering a chocolate chip cookie I'd pay good money for at a professional bakery. Of course, I paid good money for it, but this brown butter beauty had earned it.  

At Costco, excess is the order of the day. You can't get many items in a single serving; it's either multiple boxes of pasta or none. But the chocolate chip cookie is one of the rare items that you can actually get on the spectrum. You can either get the 24-pack of Kirkland's Signature Gourmet Chocolate Chunk Cookies or the one jumbo, still-warm-from-the-oven cookie at the food court. 

I'll admit that I was already quite familiar with — and maybe a bit biased toward — the delicious charms of the Kirkland cookies. Unlike the Publix or Target tray of cookies, this bulk collection always delivers a fabulous product that's dense with chocolate, nicely golden, and supremely soft without feeling artificial. And if I was rating cookies on price and quantity, these would already have the title in the bag.

But the food court chocolate chip cookie was a new revelation for me. Even after it had cooled for a couple of hours, I was still treated to a delightfully molten interior, thick with gooey chopped chocolate. I could tell right off the bat that this was made with butter rather than oil, as the caramelized flavor definitely had a toasted milk fat undercurrent and the cookie had a crunchier overall texture. Either cookie is a solid chocolate chip entry; one just works better for the hostess of a party and the other is meant for a party of one. 

When I originally laid out all of the cookies for photography, my husband meticulously scanned them and selected the Trader Joe's Sea Salt Chocolate Chunk Cookies as the best of the bunch, like a chocolate chip cookie-specific terminator. Annoyed, I haughtily told him that he hadn't even tasted them yet, so he couldn't possibly know that. Alas, I admit with wounded pride that he used sight alone to correctly pick what I needed my full senses to confirm.  

In case you don't happen to have a chocolate chip cookie connoisseur in your life, I'll go ahead and give you the average consumer's 5-sense review. As already noted by my husband, these cookies looked great, and I particularly appreciated the visible flakes of sea salt sprinkled on top. For texture, I loved that it had classic crispy edges with a super-soft interior, as the contrast made it seem like an authentic home-baked cookie. But the true clincher here was the flavor. 

This was the only cookie that offered a true punch of vanilla, an aromatic note that you could smell, not just taste. The chocolate was also well executed, chopped up finely in parts so that you can get a bit of cocoa in every bite. Add to that a rich sprinkling of salt to drive all that nuanced flavor home, and you have the best chocolate chip cookie you can find from a grocery store bakery. 

I went to all the grocery stores I had access to that offered store-branded chocolate chip cookies. I tried numerous chocolate chip cookies on offer at each store bakery as long as the recipe seemed to vary from one another. This kept me from trying certain cookies where only size was the difference, but let me evaluate vegan and elevated variations. 

I evaluated looks first, deeming whether a cookie seemed too pale or lacking even chocolate chip dispersal. I also looked to see whether the cookie texture was satisfying without favoring any one style. For instance, I was happy to give a cakey cookie the same marks as a chewy one as long as it wasn't overly dry. I also considered the chocolate taste and texture in relation to the cookie base, noting whether it was too sweet or overly bitter in the grand scheme. Price was another consideration. If a cookie commanded a high price point but delivered a subpar product, I pointed that out.