Chewy, Gummy, And Slimy: The One Kroger Bakery Item That You'll Want To Skip

Grocery store bakery items are an easy way to pick up a quick breakfast or a sweet treat, but as we recently discovered, they aren't all built (or baked) equally. In our ranking of nine different grocery store bakery cinnamon rolls, one grocery store's bakery cinnamon rolls were a huge disappointment, with a specific feature that our writer went so far as to call "gag-inducing."

Kroger's Bakery Fresh Goodness Cinnamon Rolls came in dead last on our list, for multiple reasons. While the rolls looked appealing, our taste tester wrote, "What appeared to be a fanciful drizzle of frosting over the top of these simple rolls was actually a gag-inducing slimy gel that slid around my mouth like wet caulk. The offending ingredient responsible for the slick and stretchy frosting is agar-agar, which, when used sparingly, can add jiggle to a no-bake cheesecake, put the gummy in gummy bears, and make boba tea extra-chewy — definitely not the textures I want in an icing." 

And the rolls themselves were too bready with very little substance, as well as being unappealingly dry. It's important to note that Kroger also sells another type of cinnamon roll under its in-house Private Selection brand, which are much larger per individual roll, and come with four in one package. Unfortunately, these weren't a hit either and came in second-to-last.

We're not the only ones with mixed feelings about Kroger's cinnamon rolls, either. In a thread regarding the quality of Kroger's bakery products on Reddit, one poster said, "Lately, I got their cinnamon buns and was like, 'There's no way they could screw this up.' Well, I was wrong ... It tasted BAD and smelled BAD. We ended up throwing it away."

And in a review on Kroger's own website for its Bakery Fresh Goodness Cinnamon Rolls, one person said, "Super doughy, don't taste done, and thick flavorless icing lifts right off them." It is important to note that on Kroger's site, the majority of people enjoyed the Bakery Fresh Goodness Cinnamon Rolls (four stars out of five), and one said a quick warm-up makes them taste much better. Kroger's isn't the first time cinnamon rolls have divided shoppers.

But if you're still looking for a fantastic store-bought cinnamon roll, not all is lost. The best cinnamon roll we found was actually at Whole Foods, which comes with ultra-creamy frosting — the exact opposite of what we found at Kroger.