Where Does Costco Get Its Raspberries From?

Costco's raspberries tend to look delicious, but do you know where they come from? It turns out the U.S. version of the chain sources its raspberries from various locations in the U.S. and Mexico, with local farms providing fruit to the warehouses, per its website. Among the distributors who provide fresh berries to Costco is Nature's Choice Produce, a woman-owned fair trade organic growing company located in San Diego, California. Its raspberries are grown in Baja California, per their official website.

The brand you end up with is based upon the growing season and the region your Costco is located in. Another nationally known grower behind Costco's organic raspberries is Driscoll's, which also distributes fruit to large chains such as Dollar General and Target. On its official website, Driscoll's declares that its fruit is grown in four California towns: Oxnard, Watsonville, Santa Maria, and Salinas. They also grow produce in Central Mexico and Baja California. 

If you're buying another brand of raspberries from Costco, you can check the label on the package to find out where they were grown. At bare minimum, the label will typically indicate the country it came from, and from there, you can look deeper into the fruit's origin point via a web search. It's important to note that Costco's Kirkland frozen raspberry products, such as its Signature Three Berry Blend, are grown by yet another American producer, Townsend Farms.

How should one keep their Costco raspberries at peak freshness? While you can store them in the fridge – both in the front of and outside of its vegetable crisper, as Driscoll's suggests — that won't necessarily keep your berries fresh. To wit: some customers have alleged the chain's raspberries are one of the worst produce items to buy at Costco because of how quickly they can go bad, sometimes spoiling within days of being purchased.

Consumers who congregate at Reddit's r/costco have hotly debated the worth for this very reason. "Does anyone else find that Costco raspberries are consistently trash?" one user reported. Several posters weighed in to allege that the berries they buy at the chain tend to get moldy very quickly. Others claimed that getting fresh raspberries that don't immediately go rotten sometimes works out for them and sometimes doesn't. But a number of buyers stuck up for Costco's raspberries, reporting that they're always fresh. "I'm in Kansas and they have been amazing the last two weeks. I didn't have a single bad berry," a poster said.