Imagine it’s lunchtime, and you head to one of the many grocery store hot food bars. You scoop up some jasmine rice, steamed veggies, and sweet and spicy tofu. Potato and pea samosa? Why not. To finish, you add some crunchy pumpkin seeds, and now you have a quick, complete meal, ready to eat on the go. At the cash register, the hot bar meal rings up to $22. It must be a mistake! But no, you are simply at Whole Foods.
This is one of the main reasons you might want to avoid the Whole Foods hot bar: It’s expensive. At $11.99 per pound, the price might not seem too high. But when you start adding dense items like rice, potatoes, roasted chicken, and hard-boiled eggs, filling a box with a pound of food is easy. A serving of rice, a ½ cup, weighs a little over 4 ounces, about a ¼ pound — that’s already $3. A serving of potatoes is 5 ounces, about ⅓ of a pound — this would cost $4. These aren’t complete meals, and after adding an ounce here and there, all of a sudden, you have nearly 2 pounds of food.
One of the worst parts is that if you go to ring up your hot bar food and see it’s far more expensive than what you expected, you can’t exactly go and put it back. While you could do this with other pre-packaged to-go foods and grocery items, your box of food will likely get tossed if you don’t buy it since it has already left the hot bar area.
Whole Foods does not make its hot bar food on-site
Thinking you could justify your $22 box of hot bar food by the fact that it’s made fresh? Well, you can’t. To add insult to injury, Whole Foods does not prepare most of the foods it serves in the hot bar from scratch. Before 2017, the grocer did indeed have large on-site kitchens where it prepped all or most of the food fresh daily. However, since then, Whole Foods has shifted to using third-party kitchens, which prep all of the food and deliver it to the store, which then heats it and puts it out on the bar.
Some fed-up Reddit users in a thread on r/WholeFoods have complained about the declining quality of the hot food bar since the change. Other users suggest that rather than paying so much for reheated chicken tikki masala or half-warm chow mein noodles, it makes more sense to go to an Indian or Chinese food buffet for hot food made fresh every hour and available at a lower price, too.
If you’re shopping at Whole Foods and want to pick up a quick lunch to go, you could make a lightweight salad from the cold bar section. This could be paired with a slice of pizza, or another packaged, prepared food item (here are some of our favorites). The benefit to choosing these options is that they already have a price tag, so you won’t be met with any surprises at the register. And on Fridays, remember that the grocer offers a BOGO 50% off deal on prepared sushi rolls.
