Trader Joe's haul

Oh Trader Joe's, how I love thee. Your fun and tasty offerings, your wallet-friendly prices, your Hawaiian shirts, but most especially your awesome selection of AIP friendly goodies! You make me feel like a normal person.  <3

I went to Trader Joe's this weekend to see if there was anything (besides the usual meat, veg, and dried fruit) that was AIP compliant and they did not disappoint. Some of the oil choices are questionable (lots of Omega-6 heavy industrial seed oils) but other than that, there were some really fun products. Check it out:

Broccoli Florets

Crunchy chip replacements. When I was doing low carb I'd eat these with sour cream and onion dip... DELICIOUS! They're surprisingly tasty, and you get greens in your snack. Ingredients: broccoli, rice bran oil, salt.


Just Beets

Basically dehydrated beet chips. I haven't tried them yet but they're literally just beets. They're beets, how can you go wrong?? Ingredients: Beets.


Organic Ginger Turmeric Herbal Tea

I love ginger tea, so this should be good. And there's turmeric in it too! It's always good to get some of that awesome antioxidant in your diet. It does have black pepper, which, as a berry, should be avoided in the early stages of the AIP protocol. Also, stevia is not AIP. It's a bit of a grey area food, but I'm going to use it as something of a treat. Ingredients: ginger root, turmeric, licorice, orange peel, orange oil, black pepper, stevia.


Plantain Chips

Seeing as I practically live on these things it's nice that TJ's has plantain chips. The only downside is that these also are fried in seed oils.  :(   Ingredients: plantains, sunflower oil, salt.


Sweet Potato Chips

Another staple chip for AIP'ers, these are nice and crunchy. Watch out for those seed oils, though. Ingredients: sweet potatoes, a mixture of different seed oils, salt.


Banana Chips

These are sweetened so they're not for every day use, but they're nice to have on hand as a treat (especially when your co-workers are holding a bake-off, which is unfortunately a common thing at my job.) Also, they aren't made with any dodgy oils. Ingredients: bananas, coconut oil, sugar, natural banana flavor (???)


Ginger Chews

These are awesome - watch out if you have a problem with spicy foods because these babies are HAAAAAAAT! Ingredients: sugar, ginger, tapioca starch.


Coconut Chips

No, they're not as good as Dang! coconut chips (they're a bit tougher) but these are still darn tasty. Ingredients: coconut, salt, sugar, coconut milk, coconut juice.


Apple Banana Fruit Sauce "Crushers"

Yes, it's a lot of sugar. And yes, there's a lot of packaging waste (these are basically those baby food pouches you see in stores), but they're tasty as heck and handy for trips where you need to eat something that doesn't require utensils. I'm keeping these on hand for my next trip. Ingredients: apple puree, banana puree, ascorbic acid, citric acid (the latter two are "for freshness.")


Coconut Cream

HOORAAAYYYY!!!! IT'S BACK!!!! Last time we went to TJ's there was no coconut cream! The person there said it had been discontinued. GASP! Well, it appears that I'm not the only sad coconut cream lover shopping at TJ's because they brought it back. It's also about $2 cheaper than the coconut cream at my local food coop. And it's organic! So much win! Ingredients: coconut, water. [Post-refrigeration update: This new coconut cream is no bueno in the refrigerador  :(   It separates into one solid half and one liquid half. You can't even make whipped coconut creat with it. This never used to happen with the other coconut cream! Maybe it's because that cream had emulsifiers in it? Ugh, whatever. It's still good for cooking hot foods.]


So there you have it, a few of the more interesting items at Trader Joe's that you can eat while on AIP. They often have questionable or grey area ingredients but I'd say they have a place in an overall healthy AIP diet as a way to make us feel more normal. Many of these also make great travel foods for bringing on the road with us. I'm going out of town at the end of the month and you can be sure that I will be bringing many of these with me!

(Note, some of these packages are already open. I didn't think to take pics until after I'd gotten home and torn into my goodies. My bad!)