Gluten-Free review --
Since TJ's came to Chicago's North Shore area, it's always been the first go-to of my weekly grocery shopping for price, gluten-free, good choice of organics, and fresh produce. Workers are always friendly, English-speaking, and helpful. If you haven't shopped at the store before, they will get you a list of all their gluten-free-related* products. If you can't find something, the shelf-stockers will stop what they're doing to direct you to it or look it up in the system. If they're out of an item, they'll order it for you and hold it. If you shop here (or any other of their stores) regularly, they're very likely to remember your name.
Though the Libertyville store has one of the larger TJ layouts in the area, it still is relatively small, compared to conventional supermarket size. For this reason, many products are only carried seasonally, whether or not a season is normally associated with a product. For example, last November I bought a few cartons of their new organic turkey bone broth. I bought some more in early December. When I came back for more in January, they told me that it was a Thanksgiving-related seasonal product. This can be frustrating, especially when you go there expecting to pick up a specific thing.
Another issue related to store size is that there is little to no diversity of brands and almost all product is under one of the TJ labels -- though this is not necessarily a bad thing (see yogurt mention below). One of the exceptions to this is in their wine, beer and liquor department.
The good thing related to store size is that I can make my trips here shorter than at conventional grocery stores. The not-so-good thing is that I usually have to also stop, at least, at one other store to complete my shopping list -- usually for brand-name items. However, they do have many things -- like internationally influenced or culinarily/health progressive foods/products -- that are hard to find elsewhere.
Back to GF... *Some of their products may be labeled, "Made on equipment shared with products that include gluten ingredients, " "Made in a facility that also processes gluten," or "No gluten (ingredients) added." I'm not exactly sure what the last one means, as this is the only place I've seen that used. I suppose it's a disclaimer of intention, as in, "We didn't intend to use gluten-contaminated ingredients, but at least we didn't knowingly add any straight gluten to this recipe." Is it that hard to test to officially declare it's GF? I'll leave it to you to determine how the worst-case scenarios of the other two statements might affect you. Note: There are no inspectors to determine how thoroughly shared machines are cleaned out between product runs, and HVAC equipment can spread flour around.
I suppose the nature of TJ's slapping their house label on third-party-made exclusive products is at the root of such a weird disclaimer. They mustn't be able to have their own inspector around for the product's ingredient acquisition, handling, and manufacturing process.
Sometimes their third-party suppliers are the makers of the actual name-brand products, that you think they're trying to imitate, operating incognito -- for reason I can only guess has something to do with pricing for competing business customers. This came to light for me when a favorite peach organic non-dairy GF yogurt that TJ's and Whole Soy & Co both sold was not available at the same time, when an independent manufacturer for Whole Soy reneged on their contract. Whole Soy decided to build their own facility and started production later that year. TJ's miraculously started stocking it again at the same time until Whole Soy went out of business (bankruptcy) a few months later. This was a few years ago and the product hasn't yet made a return to any TJ's.
So if you have a belief that that their house labeled items might be inferior to name-brand items, you might be pleasantly surprised.
All in all a positive experience. Just be cautious of the nature of GF labeled items, if you may be effected. read more