Wegmans Bakery Items Ranked From Worst To Best

With stale croissants, hard cookies, and day-old cake slices galore, your average grocery store bakery is a place of tasty-enough mediocrity. Not so fast, says Wegmans, a brand that despite having only 110 odd stores has long been a consumer favorite. We, explains Wegmans, motioning to Walmart and Shoprite with jazz fingers, are different — at least that's what we imagine the store saying if it were a real person. The best part is that our fictional personification of Wegmans isn't lying. While the regional chain is known for quality products, many fans agree Wegmans' bakery items stand high above the rest. With that being said, if Wegmans baked goods' iron is truly tested, which of these tasty treats would come out on top?

Some may call us crazy for going on this mission of sorting through a bunch of delicious, high-quality baked goods and deciding which is most worth binging in a single sitting. But we at Mashed have never been afraid of eating food. After carefully curating a list of the best baked goods Wegmans has to offer based on fan approval and store recommendations, we ranked 13 of Wegmans' most adored bakery products. Noting their prices (which vary by location and are accurate as of September 2023), we ranked these treats based on the presence of their advertised ingredients, freshness, and overall flavor. From worst to first, here's what happened after we put Wegmans' best baked goods to the taste test.

Among Wegmans' glorious baked goods, fans report its doughnuts are some of the freshest and finest. But out of all of its plentiful doughnut selection, Wegmans recommends shoppers snag the glazed cinnamon swirl variety. And who are we to challenge the great and powerful grocer?

Costing $5 for four sizable sweets, according to Wegmans, these baked goods are essentially the love children of spice-packed cinnamon rolls and sweet glazed classic doughnuts — which is apparent in these treats' unique structure. The glazed cinnamon swirl doughnuts are built like swirly-twirly cinnamon rolls down to their glaze-packed center. These snacks also have a visible sprinkle of cinnamon baked throughout their layers. But while the doughnuts look like a cinnamon roll and smell like a cinnamon roll, tragically, they don't taste like one.

Let's be clear here: These doughnuts are so fresh and perfectly textured that they could bring a tear to your eye. The glaze is plentiful without being overwhelming and delightfully sweet-tasting. However, the cinnamon flavor is incredibly minimal. So while the glazed cinnamon swirl doughnuts are a treat for your mouth, they just taste like really good glazed donuts. Yes, they have more of their advertised flavor than the Tuscan bread, but until they start taking after both their parents, the glazed cinnamon swirl doughnuts will continue to be one of Wegmans' lower ranked baked goods.

In the words of one Trip Advisor reviewer, fans of Wegmans generally report the grocer's muffins are "to die for." So of course, we had to check out these deadly baked goods for ourselves. We opted for the peach variety, because, once again, Wegmans recommends it.

As soon as you open up a package of these muffins, you'll see each one has bits of baked-in peach bleeding through the top. Then, you'll be hit with the smell of fresh fruit. And when you bite into a serving of these rather large sweets, your mouth will be greeted by a wonderful vanilla-tanged-by-peach flavor. While these muffins don't have a chocolate drizzle topping them off like Wegmans chocolate chip version of the baked treat, they do have a crunchy sugar upper coat that adds to the product's texture and taste. Though honestly, half of what makes these muffins so good is how insanely fresh and moist they are.

So why then are the peach muffins so far down the list? Well, while there are clearly small pieces of peach spread throughout the muffin (that are, to their credit, bigger than the cranberries in the mini orange cranberry scone), they aren't big enough to make a major taste difference. At $7.29 for a four-pack of peach muffins, we're on the verge of sending them to a reform camp for troubled teens because they are wasting their potential.

Bagels are another beloved Wegmans bakery category, and while the grocer sells plenty of appetizing flavors ranging from classic sesame to the more unusual jalapeno variety, we chose the plain one. Because if a store can't make a plain bagel taste good, we know its more intensive flavored baked goods aren't going to be any better.

The Wegmans website claims its bagels are made "New York style" – aka its crust is supposed to be hard while the inside is supposed to be chewy. When we tried these bagels, we remembered that Wegmans (having opened its first store in New York state) is truly a native New Yorker.

Fresh-tasting and -smelling as well as generously sized, our plain bagel had a beautiful browned bottom and a hard exterior. But it was our bagel's doughy insides that really did it for us. The layers of interior dough were a treat to chew on. Priced at $1.29 for a single bagel and $7.75 for a six-pack, these bagels, though plain, came out on top of the baked goods before them in our ranking because they are both fresh and everything their description promises them to be. However, their taste, while beautiful in its simplicity, couldn't outdo the flavors of our next picks.

While some of the items on our list have been pseudo-celebrities, Wegmans mini chocolate chip cookies (yes the mini version, not the full-sized ones) earn biblical proportions of worship. There are countless copycat recipes for these cookies online. If a news article is talking about must-eat snacks at Wegmans, these baked goods will be on the list. Needless to say, when we finally got a package of them in our hands, we were ready to test their tasty powers.

And we found that these cookies, unlike the Tuscan bread (no, we will not stop being bitter about that), are worth the hype.

You know the taste of freshly cooled break and bake cookies? Soft and perfectly textured? That's what Wegmans mini chocolate chip cookies are like. From the second we picked up and felt the softness of these mean lil' dudes, we knew we were in for a treat. Aside from their consistency, Wegmans mini chocolate chip cookies are also full of great, mall-cookie-level flavor (if you know, you know) and have an excellent amount of chocolate chips. Costing $5 for 15 servings (two cookies per serving) or $7 for 31 servings, these mini chocolate chip cookies are delicious (and all their ingredients are present and easily tastable). But they didn't knock us so far off our feet in terms of quality or intensity like the next items on our list.

Yes, Wegmans dares to make cannolis. And yes, the grocer's mini chocolate cannolis are some of the finest pieces of pastry you'll ever have the honor of putting in your mouth.

True to their name, these cannolis are absolutely drenched in dark chocolate. Aside from being coated with a thick outer chocolate shell, the dark chocolate is also layered on the inside of the shell. However, as serious as the chocolate content is (as it should be), we all know a chocolate cannoli is only as good as its filling. And, boy, what a baked good.

Wegmans' take on this famous Italian pastry features a wonderfully crunchy shell filled with exquisitely creamy and light ricotta. So the chocolate isn't doing all the heavy taste lifting. It's working with the filling to create a snack akin to a gourmet cookie. With all elements teaming up to bring your mouth a great flavor (unlike the strawberry shortcake's ingredients), the only downfall of these cannolis (which cost $6 for a pack of four), is that the chocolate on this refrigerated snack may melt on your fingers. Still, for all of the deliciousness of these cannolis, our top three treats are full of such flavor intensity that they blew our hair back.

No. 2 marks a treat that for the first time in a long time had us in a flavor stupor from the moment it hit our tongue. This, ladies and gentlemen, is the fan-adored lemon crumb bar. 

After regrouping from our initial taste test, here's what we expertly deduced. Composed of lemon cream on top of a cookie crust, these lemon crumb bars have a flavor that is best described as a bright tart lemon tang that fades into a sweet, creamy taste. These bars are luxuriously smooth, like the final, delicious evolution of a lemon meringue pie. Half of the top is sprinkled in snow sugar, and the other half is topped with a kind of shortbread crumble. We cut into both sides and found the sugar added an extra oomph of sweet while the cookie crumbs provided an interestingly gritty texture. However, we wished the cookie crumbs were more firm. As they stand now, they don't add as much crunch as they should and could.

If you're complaining that we had a similar problem with the ingredients in the strawberry shortcake, which didn't make it near as far on our list, we hear you. But we also want to make you realize just how insane the flavor of the Wegmans $5.50 per two-pack lemon crumb bar is — a flavor that almost carried it all the way to the top.