Grocery tourism is the hot trend of 2026 according to Condé Nast Traveler. This is all well and good, but also a bit late to the trolley because I have been practicing this trend since my twenties, although without the benefit of a name or a hashtag.
My two worlds met in the supermarket aisle. Before I was a travel writer and sent to places with hotel beds that appeared to have been prepared for minor royalty or a very clean corpse, I was a checkout chick at supermarket chain Coles. This was when prices were typed in by hand, making me feel like I was conducting a low-level NASA launch procedure.
A tin of pineapple rings would trundle towards me, and I would punch in its code. Behind it would come shampoo, fish fingers, instant pudding, 24 cans of Diet Coke, and a packet of aspirin. From these items, I could deduce entire family systems. Marriage trouble. School excursions. Flu. A birthday party. A woman about to murder everyone in her house unless she got a Mint Slice into herself immediately.
I loved the products. Not necessarily the customers who could turn feral over a five-cent discrepancy in canned tomatoes. The conveyor belt was a pageant of human need. It was anthropology in a polyester apron.
When people now declare that they have discovered grocery store tourism, I feel like saying, “We know. We’ve had those for years.”
My first trip to America should have been my grand supermarket awakening. I was a PR manager for Malaysia Airlines in the late ’90s, and we were launching a very long flight to New York from Sydney via KL and Dubai. I arrived bristling with ambition. I wanted to see the cereal aisle. Long had we heard rumors of American supermarkets. They were great glittering cathedrals of corn syrup with aisles devoted just to cereal and marshmallows in the shapes of everything from the moon and stars to presidents. I wanted to stand before them all in awe, like Moses, if Moses had come down from the mountain carrying Pop-Tarts.
But the group itinerary was against me. We went to Macy’s and Bloomingdale’s and Saks. We went to FAO Schwarz. We went to Woodbury Common in New Jersey. But we did not go to a grocery store. We stayed at The Mark, and while it’s a beautiful hotel, it’s a hopeless base for a woman hoping to loiter near canned soup. Five days in New York and not a single trolley. I still consider this one of the great failures of my professional life.
Japan was different because come hell or highwater, I was finding a supermarket, and I did. Japan has KitKats in flavors that sound like haiku composed during a fever. There are soft drinks made of melon and sandwiches so neat they seem to have been assembled by watchmakers.
I once stood in a Japanese aisle looking at 15 varieties of bottled tea and felt the kind of reverence other people reserve for stained glass. This is the point of grocery tourism. It’s anthropology with a basket.
Every country gives itself away eventually. This is usually somewhere between the biscuits and the cleaning products. Finland offers Moomins in places no Australian supermarket would dare put a cartoon hippo. Singapore understands the spiritual importance of salted fish skin. Sweden puts things in tubes that should never be in tubes and then offers fermented herring.
And then the Netherlands has licorice. The Dutch have built an entire moral philosophy out of licorice. Sweet, salty, double-salty, hard, soft, shaped like coins, cars, and warnings from your dentist. I’ve always admired the Dutch, but this commitment to black chewy punishment is heroic. Sweden is not to be outdone and has thus flirted with licorice-flavored chips.
Then there are the products that cause the traveler to stop dead and reconsider the whole Enlightenment. In Vietnam, I couldn’t walk past snake wine without dancing an involuntary flamenco of horror. There was a snake in a bottle suspended in alcohol. Sometimes there were scorpions.
South Korea has canned silkworm pupae. Peru has coca tea. Colombia has arequipe. America has cheese in a spray can, which I respect as both a product and a cry for help.
And now, social media has turned all of this into content. Travelers narrate the experience into their phones. A German soccer fan can wander into an American Waffle House at one in the morning and emerge as a folk hero. Erewhon in Los Angeles has become a celebrity shrine where a smoothie can cost more than a small household appliance and one strawberry comes packaged like an engagement ring and with a similar price.
Grocery stores offer the rarest thing in modern travel, the uncurated ordinary. The supermarket is the one place travel cannot fully manicure itself. Hotels can lie. Brochures can lie. Restaurants, especially the ones with menus printed on thick paper, can lie beautifully. But supermarkets are hopeless at lying. They’re too busy. They’re too full of nappies and mince.
Museums tell you what a country wants to remember. Restaurants tell you what it wants photographed. Supermarkets tell you what it eats at 6:14 PM when everyone is tired and dinner has become a hostage negotiation. They tell you whether a nation believes in breakfast or whether its citizens require 12 flavors of mayonnaise or 87 yogurts. They disclose the private life of a destination complete with its anxieties and emergency snacks. They reveal the daily economic choices of consumers.
And unlike most modern travel pleasures, grocery tourism remains relatively democratic. Not everyone can bring home a handbag from Paris, but almost anyone can bring home mustard or a jar of something that will be later placed in the pantry and avoided for six months because the instructions are in Finnish.
These are the souvenirs I love. I want the supermarket trophy. I want the tea that tastes of a mountain I didn’t climb and the chocolate I meant to give as a present but ate in the hotel room while watching a foreign game show.
Grocery tourism is really the art of paying attention. It lets us stand in aisle seven of a foreign supermarket holding cucumber cola or bird’s nest drink and think the real national monument is fizzy and possibly made from elderberries.
And sometimes, if the gods are smiling, we take it home, open it months later, and discover that the world is bewildering and occasionally tastes like a salty licorice punishment administered by a cheerful Swede.
Nicole James is an award-winning writer of fiction and non-fiction, with a career that reads like the contents of a very glamorous, slightly chaotic handbag, filled with glossy magazines, boarding passes, and just a hint of ink-stained panic.
She’s spent years writing columns for a variety of newspapers and magazines. These days she is penning novels, when not buried under a mountain of PhD papers, valiantly attempting to complete a doctorate in Creative Writing while her cat judges her from the printer.