Target Grocery - The Good and the Bad/Ugly

I’ve waited in eager anticipation as the Broadway Target has undergone renovation to include the new grocery section. I live one block from it and when it comes to grocery shopping, my choices have been Safeway on S Street or Alhambra, venturing to West Sac, or down Freeport to the Land Park Raleys. So being able to go down the block to grab a forgotten but necessary recipe ingredient will be great.


Last week the grocery section had been opened up, but the shelves and cold cases were all empty. Today the grocery is fully stocked and open for business. I went to look around and had just a couple of observations.


First, there are some good deals. A dozen eggs is only $1.09. But as my friends remind me, that's probably from sickly, caged birds. A coworker says she bought those eggs and they were cloudy inside.  Milk prices are better here too. I only buy organic milk myself.

Selection is OK. You can find pretty much everything, you just won’t be overwhelmed by 25 types of peanut butter like other places.



I was liking the attractive spice blends from their Archer Farms label. They are in nice glass bottles and they had pretty much everything you’d need. I don’t know spice prices offhand, so don’t know how comparable they are.

Don’t expect much produce-wise. There was bananas, tomatoes, and grapes. But produce is definitely very limited.


So what’s the Ugly? The meat. I was looking at the nice assortment of meats and was wondering why certain packages of beef looked so glisten-y. The meat was bright and shiny. So I took a close look a the label and this was what I found: beef broth, potassium lactate, sodium phosphate, sodium diacetate, salt, and flavoring. This was from the Sutton & Dodge label of meats they were touting. I don’t think this meat passes the test for October: Unprocessed month! I saw the same sort of additives listed for the Hormel meats. There were some Archer Farms packaged meal meats - as in chicken stuffed with cheese and spinach or beef pinwheels with spinach and garlic butter.  There some packages that were additive free such as Laura’s Beef and their other generic packaging. But the point is, I don’t want additives in my meat!


So although I will be shopping at Target grocery, I think I’ll be buying my meat and produce elsewhere.