Why we love supermarket shopping abroad

I accidentally blew up a WhatsApp chat this week with one question: what’s your favourite foreign supermarket? My friends, some who have spent more than a decade away from the UK in locations as diverse as Singapore and Australia, all have their favourites – and fifty messages later, we’re still talking about it. While we all might loathe doing ‘the big shop’ at home, why do we get starry-eyed when doing it on our holidays?

Supermarket shopping abroad is a phenomenon on social media – there are over 50 million posts related to ‘grocery store travel’ on TikTok, full of travellers showing off their finds and celebrating the typically humdrum activity as a ‘cultural experience’. But the behaviour has been around for much longer than TikTok, gaining in popularity following the rise of the holiday rental – it’s Airbnb’s ‘live like a local’ slogan IRL.

These days, you’re far more likely to find me in a foreign supermarket on holiday than on a big red bus tour. I’d rather snoop around supermarket aisles, basket in hand, than listen to anyone tell me anything from a pre-prepared script.

In Iceland, I’ve been fascinated by the licorice-studded chocolate bars and plastic-wrapped packs of dried and flaky white fish, eaten like crisps, that hang at the end of the aisle. In New York, I always make a bee-line for Whole Foods in Union Square: there’s just something about the hipster labels, the artfully-arranged vegetables and the almost-but-not-quite handmade goods they sell there that makes me feel I’m cosplaying as a boujie New Yorker as soon as I walk through the door. 

I don’t typically seek out the fancy supermarkets or the farmers markets (Whole Foods is an exception to the rule); grocery shopping in a regular chain supermarket is my favourite way to get to know a place’s culture. The act almost evokes the voyeurism of being in someone’s home, without the embarrassment of overstepping the mark. It’s a peek inside someone’s cupboards, a viewing of their habits, which you can then compare and contrast to your own and see where you fit in. 

It’s a peek inside someone’s cupboards, a viewing of their habits

I love that in the Faroe Islands, shelves hold Cadbury’s chocolate and Tunnocks Teacakes because the British troops stationed there during World War II brought them with them, and the Faroese hung on to their food traditions when they left. In Portugal recently, I found a deeply Instagrammable aisle of tinned fish with the most beautiful packaging – as someone with a longheld love of design and fish, I couldn’t have been happier. 

You could pin the current popularity of grocery store tourism to our collective bordeom with how dull and samey certain sectors of travel have become. It’s a backlash against the idea – put most neatly in The Verge – that every coffee shop, hotel and rental apartment has started to look the same, in a giant international blandification of global culture where you can eat avocado toast and drink a cortado in a space that looks broadly the same, wherever you are in the world. You know what’s not bland and internationalised? A local supermarket chain. 

Local supermarket chains offer a counter to global ‘blandification’

Supermarket tourism is, indeed, a ‘cultural experience’, and one that’s free from the hassle of your standard tourist attractions and activites. It doesn’t have an entry fee, for a start, and you don’t need to book it in advance. You don’t have to queue to get in. You can show up when you want. It fits around you, and it’s low stakes. Compare that to booking walking tours, cookery classes, guided hikes, boat trips, and anything else you might do on your holiday, and it feels like a relief. It feels like fun, in direct opposition to trying to book timed entry tickets to a museum online. The worst that can happen is that you buy a bag of crisps that you don’t like. 

Travel firms are in on the act: The Bucket List Company CEO Keith Crockford has written a whole blog post about the phenomenon, calling it the ‘natural evolution of the desire for authentic travel’. 

‘In recent years, travellers have become increasingly disillusioned with superficial, pre-packaged experiences,’ he writes. ‘They crave genuine interactions, a deeper understanding of the places they visit. And what’s more genuine than the everyday act of doing the weekly shop?’

His firm has picked out the best items to buy in the world’s supermarkets, from biscotti and Baci chocolates in Italy to ramen in South Korea and uniquely-flavoured Kit Kats in Japan. Crockford calls the activity a ‘democratisation of travel exploration, where everyone can participate and share their findings’, and that feels true. It’s a travel experience that reminds you that we’re the same the world over, we all have our snacks and our drinks and our comfort food. But in so many tiny, weird and charming ways, we’re just a little different too. 

Such is my yen for supermarket tourism that I’ve recently started to watch YouTubers‘ grocery store hauls in Japan. Really. You wouldn’t believe what you can find in a 7-11 in Tokyo. With its kawaii packaging and madly inventive snacks, who needs to go to a Shinto shrine when they could be at a Japanese konbini? I’m researching for a trip next year and am actively looking for a way to visit as many as possible. 

Who needs to go to a Shinto shrine when they could be at a Japanese konbini?

Pharmacy tourism offers a similar thrill: who doesn’t get excited at the face creams and beautiful packaging you’ll find in a Parisian pharmacy or the anti-jet lag pills of serotonin that you can find on a shelf in a standard drug store in America? If grocery store tourism is like looking around someone else’s kitchen cupboards, pharmacy tourism is that more personal, illicit feeling of looking in your friend’s bathroom cabinet. 

RECOMMENDED: The world’s best cities for food in 2025

On a recent trip to Paris, I dragged my companion around an upscale supermarket just to look at the most everyday items. Toothpaste, which I’d ‘forgotten’ to pack and had to head immediately to a supermarket to find, suddenly took on a whole new meaning with French words on its box and new ingredients. This is the magic of the foreign supermarket: how it can make the most ordinary things extraordinary. 

What to buy where

Australia

Leave some space in your bag for a packet or ten of TimTams, Australia’s chocolate covered snacks. Also see: Vegemite and chocolate milk powder Milo.

Finland

In the non-food aisles, you’ll typically find Moomin items, like notebooks and tin cups, and Marimekko paper napkins. 

Japan

Melon Fanta, matcha-flavoured Kit Kats, and sweet corn bread are just a few of the delights to discover in Japanese supermarkets that you won’t find at home.

Singapore

Stock up on the local snacks: salted fish skin, jelly tubs, rice crackers and pineapple tarts.

Sweden

Stock up on squeezy tubes of everything from cheese to caviar. Look out too for tins of surströmming, the stinky fermented herring that you are not to open in public.

Thailand

Make a beeline for the cosmetic aisle in Thai supermarkets – we’re talking powdered collagen, whitening toothpaste and hair oils. 

Stay in the loop: sign up to our free Time Out Travel newsletter for all the latest travel news and best stuff happening across the world.