Sam's Club Vs Costco: Whose Bakery Has The Better Cookies?

When you're craving a chocolate chip cookie, do you make the trip to your local bakery? Or as so many Americans do, do you simply visit a grocery chain bakery or warehouse club food store? There's something uniquely appealing about going to a big-box store like Costco or Sam's Club and filling your cart with a pack of cookies, TV, and new office chair. The convenience is undeniable, but whether the quality is up to snuff is another matter entirely.

Our Sam's Club versus Costco bakery testing found the specific chain you visit matters in terms of quality. Bakery cookies are not one of the things Sam's Club does better than Costco, and our taste tests found Costco Kirkland Signature cookies are clearly better than Member's Mark cookies from Sam's Club. A 24-count variety pack from Costco contains chocolate chunk, white chocolate, and oatmeal raisin cookies (a pack of just chocolate chunk is also available), and they had a pleasant, buttery, and rich taste. Plus, in the chocolate chunk cookies, the chunks themselves were tastier and better distributed throughout the cookie.

Meanwhile, Member's Mark cookies are around the same size, and Sam's only sells an 18-pack of strictly chocolate chunk cookies. Sam's cookies weren't bad, but unremarkable compared to Costco's far better offering. That's not a complete surprise: Our test found, overall, Costco has the better bakery.

Both warehouse club cookies look nearly identical, and even the packaging looks similar. Still, a close look at the ingredients reveals a key difference right away: While Sam's Club cookies' ingredients start with flour, Costco cookies' first ingredient is chocolate chunks. That could explain why the Kirkland Signature variety had a better overall coverage of chocolate. Remarkably, while Kirkland Signature cookies had a richer, buttery flavor, they don't contain any actual butter. However, Member's Mark cookies do. Kirkland cookies also contain a number of leavening agents Member's Mark cookies don't, along with two spices — turmeric and annatto — which may be used for color.

Both versions are baked onsite in the respective warehouse club stores, but in both cases, they arrive at the stores as frozen dough (according to Reddit, at least). Neither, therefore, is a truly from-scratch bakery item. That's the standard in a lot of big-box store bakeries, and it's unusual to see a large supermarket actually whipping up a batch of fresh cookies from house-made dough.

These cookies are priced fairly similarly, too, though the Costco version is more expensive. Member's Mark cookies generally sell for $7.48 for the 18-pack, or 41 cents per cookie. The $10 to $12 pack at Costco contains 24 cookies. In our opinion, the money difference isn't big enough to outweigh that the Kirkland cookies are simply better.