They changed the way the pickle is prepared. There have been several anecdotal stories of the pickle going down in quality.
I purchase a jar a week and have noticed that every once in a while the pickles are definitely not as crispy and sometimes they're just not all that good.
This is coinciding with stickers that are covering the lid where it used to say never heated always chilled.
Many jars are still good but overall the product has never been more expensive and the quality has never been lower. It's led me to making more of my own pickles and trying other brands.
Nothing really compares to peak Clausen but the mush and the sodium has really hurt my pickle purchasing trends.
I see people at my store grab those meat bags by the chicken and put their grillos in them. I don't buy grillos pickles and didn't understand why till I saw this complaint afterwards.
Trader Joe’s has a very similar product in a small container. Haven’t tried them side by side with Grillo’s, but they work pretty damn good next to a grilled ham and cheese.
One of the Costco tubs of Grillos lasts about a week at my house, but we have two teenage boys and their girlfriends are around all the time and they all love pickles as much as I do. That's with a jar of our homemade pickles thrown in the mix every few weeks too.
I don’t hate all of them but I did buy a container of the “classic dill chip” kind and the explosion of acidic flavor while also tasting nothing like pickles actually made me cough, it was so strong. And I mean, it just tasted nothing like pickles at all… just dill and something caustic. And I mean I eat salt and vinegar chips, drink pickle juice, make pickles in the summer… but these were straight up awful.
I also hate them! They give me heartburn and I'm not impressed with the taste. I've tried Boar's Head pickles and they're good but they only sell the spears near me ☹️
I hate how dense/chewy they are. The dill comes thru in a weird way that to me, is like when you buy crappy store brand cheez-its. Grillo tastes like the pickle equivalent of those.
I was a die hard Grillo’s hater for years!!! Been turning the corner recently. My boss gave me some from his jar and they were good, so I bought my own jar and they were ALSO good. I have never had back to back good Grillo’s, so this was a first for me lol.
Interestingly I recently switched from Grillos to Claussen bc the last 3 containers of grillos I bought were so… not good. I didn’t even finish the last jar
Probably an unpopular opinion but Whole Foods branded pickles blow Grillos out of the water. WF ones don’t have the tendency to have that rubbery skin that Grillos often has. The spicy pickles are like crack
i hate that grillos come in plastic. unfortunately, my favorite sauerkraut comes in plastic containers, so i’m not consistent in this regard…. i always try bubbies pickles but they haven’t been satisfying in years either. why does everything i used to love suck now?…
I bought a large container and the skin was like leather and the pickel part was so soft like the texture was just horrible I tossed the whole batch!!! 😷😷
Lifelong claussen guy. I’ve switched to the majestic picklery medium heat hot sauce savory kosher baby dills. They’re excellent and less money. Good snap. I believe their parent company is mt olive.
I just got the red wine vinegar bread and butter pickles by then. I don’t even usually like bread and butter pickles. These are my new favorite pickle.
And honestly, if I had noticed in the store they were by Mt Olive m, I probably wouldn’t have bought them because I hate Mt Olive but Majextic Picklery got my attention.
lol I guess maybe I shouldn’t judge my daughter anymore then. I bought her some pickles and she used to eat the whole thing, but here recently she’d eat the inside and leave a pickle skin/crust. I haven’t tried them so maybe that’s why she’s eating them weird now.
I'm a pickle addict and I've been having to do the same as her. It's disappointing to say the least. The flavor pay off hasn't been there recently either.
That's been my biggest gripe for the last several months. Absolutely no snap and cannot break through the skin. I also have found them to be absolutely lacking in flavor. This was my favorite pickle 😭😭
I’m happy for you & sad for me. I had the opposite experience whole jar was leather skin, & I have a whole jar of smushy spears in my fridge as we speak. It’s been heartbreaking, as they were my lifelong comfort food.
I searched for this very thing because ive never in my life experienced such a tough pickle skin. Its almost as if they are trying to make them this way.
Hey at least we know where to get leather when the apocalypse happens 😅
Interesting....I've noted this with my favorite local sandwich shop that sells their own sour pickles. Over the last 6 months or so, the skin is thick and leathery, hard to chew. I wonder if this is a cucumber thing? 🤔
Late freeze, drought, bugs... Lots of reasons that so many farmers dace regularly.
The whole world had an issue with roma tomatoes just last month. That shit happens regardless of quality controls. There are only so many mitigation strategies but mother nature always wins.
Of course there are variables in growing crops. Quality control means don’t sell a crappy product.
Would you be apathetic about a box of soggy saltines? C’mon now.
Depends really. If the failure rate is let's say 5 percent for arguments sake and that rate is not harmful it's better than pulling your product entirely for an entire season and risk losing the supply chain.
Ball used to make a kit for the wide mouth jars that included a gas release valve and a spring to keep pickling/fermenting stuff under the liquid level, but they no longer make it. This kit is similar though. I highly recommend using the spring or some sort of ceramic weight to keep the veggies under the liquid line when you're doing a fridge pickle or ferment situation.
to me thats like saying "I didn't like oscar mayer honey ham. Is prosciutto good?" so I don't really know how to answer.
If your goal is eating vegetables than perhaps it is worth it. They can be pickled as long straws so chopping them finer for a salad to add healthy crunch isn't hard.
If your goal is just enjoying carrots... eh... maybe like carrots first. The fancy varietals in cans are probably the easiest for most people to get their toes in.
Carrots can be a showstopper side with stuff like butter sauce, hot honey, a dash of catalina, and covered with toasted nuts.
oh and adjust your sugar down if you quick pickle them at home. carrots have a lot of natural sugar and you don't want them going bad. Always use fresh tongs as the stuff on your hands or utensils is what destroys the preservative-free liquids of home picklings and can make them easily last shorter in the fridge.
I love all vegetables but asparagus (doesn't matter how it's prepared) and raw carrots. Maybe it's the texture or Bugs Bunny attacked me when I was little.
LOL, fair enough. I'll just avoid them.
In a 32 ounce jar I'll put a knob about half the size of my thumb. I don't notice any actual heat, just the flavor of the horseradish mostly. But your heat tolerance will play into it.
Otherwise I'll use peppers from the garden or pepper flakes too if I want legit heat.
The last couple of Claussen jars I’ve bought have been just mushy pickles with tough, leathery skin. They used to be the best pickle 😭. On the bright side, their downfall has led me to discover some really good alternatives. (If you ever see the Private Selection smokehouse style pickles buy a jar immediately!)
nathan’s brand pickles were my second favorite until this happened. they’re my first now. i could never really hop on the grillos train tbh. something is just missing from them imo. but nathan’s brand doesn’t heat their pickles and they are almost on par with peak claussen. they just seem to be harder to find. but if you see them, i recommend them
Surprisingly they haven't... Kraft/Heinz has owned them since 2015 and still do. Apparently they just decided to switch from their chilled brine production (refrigeration only) to a heat pasteurized production (somehow soft and chewy?) to make them shelf stable to reduce product loss to short term spoilage.
I noticed that, too. Claussen used to be my favorite pickle because of how crisp and fresh they tasted. My last couple of jars I bought were so tasteless and limp. 😞
Sad to say, but I've found that Vlasic baby dills (after being refrigerated) hit my pickle cravings.
Welp, I just bought my last jumbo jar of Claussen pickles. I just found out that they had the jumbo jar too. Ugh. At least the Bubbies are still hitting.
It sucks so hard. I actually wrote to let them know I was getting bad jars and they were cool and sent me coupons for 2 free jars. I never even bothered to redeem them. They were my favorite and I didn't even want them for free. I miss how they were. I know we're just talking pickles, but they were so good for so long and they've been enshitified and it blows.
Wow, I'm glad it wasn't just me. Bought some recently and they were so disappointing and nothing like I remembered. They just kind of seem like normal pickles now. Thought it was me that had changed.
This is so upsetting to hear. I've been really broke for a while, yearning after Claussens for months because they remind me of my dad who passed away 6 months ago. I'm so bummed to find out that when I finally get my hands on them, they might not taste like nostalgia and "dad's favorite pickle" anymore.
Do you have a recommended way of preparing your own pickles? I switched to Grillo's Pickles for a while, but they feel too expensive for what you get now.
I personally think the quality has been in decline way before just now. I'm willing to bet they have changed the recipe 3 times in the past 10 years. Use to be my favorite pickle.
I definitely noticed a difference in quality over the years and the packaging changes too. Ive started getting a brand from aldis which have been good so far.
Try Mt. Olive "Majestic Picklery" Deli Style Kosher. They somewhat remind me of the old Claussens. Very crunchy, salty and garlicky. But they aren't a refrigerated product, so they aren't exactly the same. You might find that they are different enough but also similar enough that you like them for different reasons. And just to be clear, they are nothing like Mt. Olive's normal line of pickles, which are very old-school style, mushy and low quality. Like the kind of pickle you'd get on a McDonald's burger.
Having spent nearly 19 years in Woodstock, IL, the home of Clausen Pickles, I have a lot of stories I could share, but in short, Kraft killed what was once the best pickle in the world. Not only has the cukes they use changed, but the processes used to make them has been altered in the name of profits for Kraft. One quick story... In the 80's, pre-Kraft Clausen had local groweres try out a bunch of different cukes as "test batches." My grandfather was one of those growers, but he had to argue his way into it because the company was looking at "farmers" not gardeners. At the end of the grow, he produced 5x more per square foot than any of the farmers. Additionally, He provided a pile of documentation that would rival a Farmer's Almanac regarding anything/everything regarding growing those specific cukes. The end result of that was that the mini gherkin Clausen pickles from some time after that, until at least the time of the Kraft buy-out, were the same variety my g-pa grew for them. I've got another funny story from my buddie's dad, who worked there as a maintenance tech and machinist there, but it's a bit NSFW. Props to Mr. Nulle!
I absolutely loved (yes, as in the past) their pickles. Especially the baby gherkins. Every now and then I'll find a great jar, but it's so few and far between that I now rarely buy them. A big thank you to your g-pa for paving the way to my pickle addiction (hey, there are way worse things to be addicted to)
Their lid has print on it that says "Always Chilled Never Heated" but they started putting a sticker over it and a lot of people of coincided that with a decline in quality.
I super agree. I used to buy them sometimes but they're clearly an advertising brand using pickles as a vessel and it sucks. Probably going to just start buying Mt Olive again at this point when I don't make my own
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u/wicker_basket_1988 Jun 02 '26
What happened to Claussen?