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Last Update: Nov 16th, 2018
Wholefoods ftl

Whole Foods Market

2000 N Federal Hwy
Fort Lauderdale FL, 33305
(954) 565-5655
Overall Rating
2.4
Food
Service
Ambiance
Value
Last Review
11/16/2018

Details

Hours: 8am-10pm
Parking: Private Lot

Pros

Excellent Produce and Seafood Depts
Shop with the Beautiful People
Unique Brands
Many more items on Sale
Amazon Prime Discounts

Cons

Many Overpriced Items
Meat is very Overpriced
Hot Food is Junk

Insider Tips

Bring your Amazon Visa for 5% off

One of my big peeves about Whole Foods (and other supermarkets) is the stupid flavored rotisserie chickens. On Saturdays, the chickens are $6, or so I thought. The sign doesn't tell you that the ones on top; the "organic" chickens, aren't on sale. All of the regular chickens have some stupid flavor, like "Tequila Lime".

Musings from 11/16/18

If you've been living under a rock (or if you're not an Amazon Prime), you might not know what's happened to Whole Foods since Amazon bought the grocery chain. In a bit over a year, the store had turned from a place where delusional rich women overpaid for the privilege of saying they shop at Whole Foods, to a bonafide option.

Any remnants of the "old" Whole Foods have been swept away; this place is clearly the Amazon Supermarket now:

Whole Foods Amazon Prime

As a prime member you get: 2 big specials every week; Today it was 40% off Spectrum Cooking Oil and some sort of organic ground beef (they can't fool me into buying the beef at the fake discount; the regular price of $6.99 is absurd), an additional 10% off all sale items, and 5% rewards if you have an Amazon Prime Visa card.

Stone crabs are back; they're very pretty but they're just not worth the price to me. $50/lb for Colossal; I'm really going to pay $50 to eat 2 big claws at home? The shell is 90% of the weight. It just seems stupid to me. You get about 5oz of meat out of 2 colossal claws. You can do the math on that yourself.

Whole Foods Stone Crab

Like them or not, they're as pretty as any food there is.

Broccoli Rabe is cheaper here than at Publix. And the produce is better quality. Or it least it looks nicer.

One negative is that the free cheese is no longer. There use to be a bucket of cut up "cheese of the day" out to appease the grazers, but they seemed to have cut that practice. No matter.

Whole food cheese

The big thing that Amazon hasn't improved is the hot food. The hot food has provided much horror and amusement to me; I don't get why people who "claim" to be willing to pay more for "quality" (the delusional view of people who rave about the worst restaurants in town), they also line up for the hot food here; most of which can be categorized as "slop".

From a distance it seems promising.

Whole Food Buffet

But then you see the food.

Whole Foods Hot Foot

Latin food that looks worse than Latin Food usually looks.

Whole Foods Hot Buffet

Asian Food that doesn't look like anything I'd want to get at an Asian restaurant.

Whole Foods Hot Buffet

The concept here is "foods of the globe". Slop from around the globe.

They do have pizza, but I can't see getting a slice in a supermarket. $3.50 for a 12" slice. There are better choices on the drive home.

Whole Foods PIzza

One week they lured me in; touting their Bavarian menu during Oktoberfest.

Whole Foods Bavarian Menu

Of course they didn't have any sausages, but I thought I'd try a few things. About $10 for a plate of food.

They have the packaging down. No chance of this popping open if you have to stop short on the way home.

Whole Foods Take Out Packaging

Time to dig in.

Whole Food German Plate

I started with the cabbage. Absolute garbage. Inedible. You choose the word. I literally spit it out.

The "turkey" meatball exemplifies why ground turkey is just a fool's game. It doesn't work. Dense, tasteless. Culinary malpractice.

Whole Foods Meatball

The chicken was wildly overcooked in a cloying globbulous sauce. Not terrible but hardly a culinary delight.

Whole Foods German Chicken

The eggplant is why people say they don't like eggplant; cafeteria style stuff that tasted like a glob of stuff you got in your dorm dining hall; I don't know how they get the sauce to taste so bad. Is this what Ragu tastes like? It's been a long time since I had bad jar sauce.

Whole Food Eggplant Parm

I re-iterrate my wonderment that people who shop at Whole Foods and claim to be "willing to pay for quality" eat this stuff. This stuff makes the HomeTown buffet seem like fine dining. I just don't get it.

Conclusion

Whole Foods has moved from a place I went once in a blue moon to buy baby bok choy to a regular, weekly stop for supplies. The hot food is nothing more than bad cafeteria food; but the produce and seafood are worth the trip by themselves.

Musings on 9/5/17

Amazon officially owns Whole Food Market now, and my first trip there gives me some idea at what changes to expect. I don't come to WFM very often; there are just a couple of items I get here. Sometimes I'll pick up the frozen flounder, but generally the fish prices here are absurd.

Wf seafood

That is until now. While the regular prices are the same, a lot of stuff is on sale. Today they had colossal shrimp for $9.99 / lb, which is a very good price. Unheard of previously in this store.

Another first was that the one item I came in to buy, organic sesame oil, was on sale.

Wf sesame

Still no bargain, but 20% off is 20% off.

There were yellow tag sales throughout the store, many more than before. I don't remember anything ever being on sale at Whole Foods.

It's not clear what WFM will be a year from know; they promise to offer benefits for prime members like myself; but for now I see them as a BIG PROBLEM for fresh market, who seems to have lost their way. It's still a specialty store, but with the sales you could shop here without feeling like a fool.

Review 6/8/14

I stopped in at Whole Foods in my quest for a local market that carries File Powder, and I was hungry for something other than Salad. I checked out their "hot" buffet, and most of the food looked terrible. Old, bad recipes. I can't figure out why supposedly fussy people who shop where would eat any of this stuff. They have about 25 soups. I looked at one after another, Most icky stuff. I can't to the end; and grabbed a small container of the "Key West" Lobster Bisque.

Whole Foods Key West Lobster Bisque

Not much lobster, too much corn. Not terrible, but I recommend that you try something else.

I can report that Whole Foods does have Gumbo File Powder, however. So the visit wasn't a complete bust.

Review 1/14/14

I'm not a huge fan of Whole Foods; I'd rather go to Fresh Market for my specialty stuff. They do have a good (but expensive) fish counter and also large salad and hot food bars. Yet I rarely find myself with anything in my basket as I hit the home stretch.

My diet gave me a chance to try another salad bar. they have 2 bars here for the same price, $8.49/lb which combines a regular salad bar with a "signature" salad bar. Frankly , I thought it was pretty lame. They do have crumbled blue cheese and grilled chicken. But most of their salads weren't anything I'd want to try. I grabbed a bit of kale; but raw kale is just nasty any way you slice it. I loaded up a place pretty well; ironically it came to exactly 1 lb. Either that or they have a 1 lb minimum. it seems dubious that it would be exact.

Whole Foods Salad Bar

So this was $8.49. They didn't have any good tomatoes; just the crappy grape tomatoes, the cucumber dill salad wasn't anywhere near as good as Fresh Markets, and the guacamole was just plan avocado, which isn't really guacamole. The worst part about the bar is that they didn't have any dressing that I wanted; no blue cheese, no Italian, no oil and vinegar. They had oil and vinegar out, but you can't make a dressing like that. They had Ranch, Cowgirl Ranch and Ranch, as if the people who come here are somehow unanimously enamored with Ranch. I took the salad without dressing; I have dressing I like at home.

One thing that I can say is consistent about Whole food is that if you're looking for 60yo women in tight workout outfits; there is no place better.

Comment Policy Add Comment
Administrator
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The food rating here is for the hot food buffet; not for the grocery food.
Angela D
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Cheap food is coming? Or not.

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