A critical breakdown of Costco’s new food court items

New introductions to Costco’s food court are always welcome, even if no amount of pleading will ever bring back the combo pizza slice, I fear. The warehouse behemoth has recently introduced some new items — a roast beef sandwich, rotisserie chicken Caesar salad, a mango smoothie and strawberry ice cream — to accompany old stalwarts like hot dogs, pizza and chicken bakes. But are they any good, and do they provide the value we expect from a place like Costco? Let’s dive in. (And for more food court opinions, please check out my recent review of Skechers’ new Food Spot in Gardena.)

Mango smoothie

At $2.99, the mango smoothie is a solid addition to the menu. There are criticisms floating around out there that the smoothie tastes like baby food. Those criticisms are complete and utter nonsense. My question to those who think this tastes like baby food is, do you even eat mango? Do you know what a mango is? Have you ever buried your face in a warm, perfectly ripe mango, chewing its slippery, slightly stringy flesh until golden, sticky juice has completely covered your hands and fingers?

If so, then you’d recognize that this concoction approximates a mango as closely as pretty much any industrialized product I can think of. It tastes like biting into a mango. Now, people may not want that. They may want a severely watered-down version of that deep, rich mango flavor — a Spindrift or a piece of mango candy, maybe. This isn’t that. It tastes like fruit, and that’s good. And OK, fine: I will grant that the texture is ever so slightly on the baby food end of the spectrum. It doesn’t bother me.

Roast beef sandwich

Indulge this brief side note for a second, please: Costco makes a lot of its profit on membership fees. When you buy way more beef jerky than one human should consume, or a 50-gallon drum’s worth of mayonnaise, Costco probably isn’t making a killing on those items. It’s making a killing on the $60 membership you paid, which is pure profit.

Meanwhile, at the food court, Costco is famous for selling its hot-dog-and-soda combo for $1.50 — a price that, it’s commonly accepted, cannot possibly be profitable. However, that price builds goodwill and gets people to buy memberships. This is even more true now that Costco requires said membership to eat at its food courts, a policy adopted in 2020.

Back to the new roast beef sandwich. It certainly seems priced not to lose money. At $9.99, one roast beef sandwich costs more than an entire pepperoni pizza ($9.95). And while that may not be a fair comparison for a sandwich, it’s a comparison that Costco itself has helped create.

And it is, in my opinion, not quite worth it. It’s a good-sized sandwich, with a healthy serving of well-done roast beef slices, a piquant mayo-mustard mix, a sweet, onion-y jam and some confit-style cherry tomatoes. But an overly hearty ciabatta roll sucks up any and all moisture, leaving the sandwich far too dry. The tomatoes are tasty, but there are far too few included with the sandwich. I would have picked a softer, more pliable bread for this sandwich and upped the condiment level about 100%.

Strawberry ice cream

The strawberry ice cream, at $1.99 for a generous cupful, is a great addition to the menu. The flavor is light, milky and sweet, like a strawberry mousse cake. It’s a gentle suggestion of strawberry — the opposite of the mango smoothie, which is a fruity sledgehammer to the taste buds. But the strawberry ice cream is, on balance, tasty and a welcome break from the nonstop parade of vanilla cups and sundaes. (For more on soft serve, check out my rundown of the best fast-food soft serve, part of our Summer of Ice Cream package.)

Rotisserie chicken Caesar salad

This salad will naturally draw comparisons to the previous iteration of Costco’s Caesar, of which I was a big fan. That salad had cherry tomatoes and a kind of compressed, particleboard-like chicken that wasn’t the best but was fine for a budget salad and comforting, in a frozen-chicken-fingers kind of way.

The new salad lacks the tomatoes of its predecessor but has, as advertised in the name, a portion of real rotisserie chicken instead of a more industrial chicken. Its price, $6.99, is also $2 more than an entire rotisserie chicken purchased at Costco. As with the roast beef sandwich, my sense is that Costco is introducing some higher-priced items designed to offset the bargain pizzas and hot dogs.

Not that I would ever do this, but wouldn’t it be more cost-effective to buy a couple of heads of romaine and a rotisserie chicken and make your own salad or three? Sure would. But you’re paying for the convenience, and heaven knows the menu desperately needed a salad. In this case, the redesigned salad is a welcome, if slightly underwhelming, addition.