Sam's Club Vs Costco: Which Chicken Pot Pie Tastes Better?

The old adage to never shop on an empty stomach is certainly one I've broken many times. I typically end up with an overflowing cart, stuffed with snacks and other items that simply caught my eye in the moment. Then, I'll typically end up stopping for a quick bite on the way home, even as my trunk is full of groceries. It's not a great sequence of events to get sucked into, but Costco and Sam's Club have something of a solution. Rather than just getting snacks, I can choose one of the ready-to-eat or cook meals and heat it up as soon as I get home. While it won't be a meal I prepared for myself, I certainly cooked it, and on a hungry stomach, surely that's better for the old pocketbook than the additional food pickup on the way home.

Perhaps the most appetizing of these ready-to-heat and eat offerings at both stores is the chicken pot pie. Both stores offer it in large portions that easily feed a family. After you get home, it's simply a matter of heating up your oven and cooking the pot pie for roughly an hour. It's hard to go wrong with a comforting dish like chicken pot pie, but I wondered how the two warehouses' pot pies compared. I tried both to see if there was a clear winner.

A classic chicken pot pie is a hearty meal. It often looks like a sweet fruit pie, like apple or cherry, but it has a savory filling. It's easy to confuse a chicken pot pie and cobbler, but a big giveaway will be the shape: A pie is round, but a cobbler will often be rectangular. Many times, you'll find pot pies with a decorative lattice crust, like the classic apple pie. In most chicken pot pies, you'll find chicken, carrots, celery, peas, and onion, all combined to form a filling that is the epitome of comfort food.

While you could always make a chicken pot pie from scratch at home, there are also plenty of brands that offer frozen pot pies that you heat in your oven. It takes the work out of this comforting meal and makes it something achievable, even during the busiest of weeks.

Some stores, notably Costco and Sam's Club, offer many heat-and-eat meals, and one of the more impressive offerings at these warehouse stores is the chicken pot pies. Rather than being frozen, these meals are in refrigerator cases, ready for you to take home and eat.

At Costco, you'll find the chicken pot pies in refrigerator coolers in front of a large bay of windows leading to a kitchen where employees are preparing the ready-to-cook meals. Sam's Club also has its meals in large refrigerated coolers, but based on what I've seen through various videos and social media posts, they aren't directly in front of windows so that you can watch employees prepare the dishes. The kitchens at Sam's Club aren't so open to shoppers to view.

Price-wise, both stores price pot pies by weight. Costco's price per weight is $3.99 per pound. The pot pie I picked up was $22.58 total. Sam's Club offers its pot pies for a little less, $3.78 a pound. If purchased in-store, my pie would have been $17.69. Unfortunately, since I do not have a Sam's Club membership, I needed to purchase my pot pie over Instacart, which has a rather high markup. I paid $4.80 per pound for a total of $24 for the Sam's Club pot pie.

There is some variance between the two chicken pot pies. For one, the Costco pie's serving size is smaller than the Sam's Club pie. Costco has a serving size of 5 ounces, while Sam's Club has a serving size of 6 ¼ ounces. Granted, at over 5 ½ pounds, the Costco pie I purchased was nearly a pound more of food than the Sam's Club pie, which weighed in at just over 4 ½ pounds.

To keep comparisons easy, I calculated the total nutritional value for each pie, taking the number for each nutritional stat and multiplying it by the number of servings. All told, the Sam's Club pie had more calories (5,640), grams of fat (360 grams), milligrams of cholesterol (600 milligrams), and grams of carbohydrates (432 grams) than Costco's pie. The only two areas where Costco's numbers were higher than Sam's Club were in milligrams of sodium (14,940 milligrams) and grams of protein (216 grams).

For ingredients, the Costco pot pie had rotisserie-style chicken in it with ingredients that would ultimately create more a more broth type of flavor. There are also more veggies, and with the addition of flavors like thyme, it's savory. Sam's Club's pot pie ingredients create a smoother, more dairy-based filling that is richer, with fewer veggies and using seasoned chicken breast rather than rotisserie.

Costco's ready-to-heat pot pie had wavy-cut crust strips forming a lattice-like top to the pot pie. Underneath, you can see big pieces of rotisserie chicken sticking out of the filling. It's contained in a large holder that is not simply a circle. Instead, it's slightly wavy in places, making the removal of the pie from its container easier.

I cooked the pot pie according to package instructions until it reached 165 F. Although the package said this could take as long as an hour and a half, it was ready to go in one hour. I let it rest for a little to allow cooling and congealing time. In any case, it still wasn't the prettiest cut out of a pie I've ever made, but even from that first cut, I could make out baby carrots and big pieces of chicken.

I found that in addition to it looking a little more homemade, less made by a machine, it also tasted that way. The crust wasn't much special, but I was more excited about the abundance of veggies. Seeing so many big pieces of bright colors makes it feel a little less heavy, even if a pot pie is nearly always a heavy dish.

Sam's Club's pot pie also goes for a lattice-type crust topper. However, instead of wavy noodles, these are cut in straight, simple lines, and the packaging is effective, but simple, too. This Sam's Club pot pie also requested an interior filling of 165 F, and like the Costco Pot Pie, it got there in about an hour. This pot pie had just as much time to congeal and sit, but it was even more crumbly when taking out servings, and even though it's a pound smaller, it certainly didn't seem that way.

The makeup of the pie felt more like a thick soup in crust, and texture-wise, it was the difference between using a canned pie filling in, say, an apple pie, as opposed to freshly cut and seasoned apples. That said, the crust was super enjoyable with an extra flaky and enjoyable texture.

Ultimately, my goal was to determine which pot pie tasted better, and in that aspect alone, the pies are pretty close to one another. However, the Costco pot pie was ultimately my favorite flavor, largely because the veggies added a fresh, carefully prepared, and even more enjoyable taste. The crust on the Sam's Club pie was more enjoyable than Costco's, but the filling is where a majority of the flavor comes from, so I've gotta give this one to Costco.

Although it doesn't have a whole lot to do with flavor, I also found that Costco wins top marks for packaging and presentation of the pot pie. The details like adding a wavy cut to the crust strips make it just a little more interesting to look at and more exciting to serve. It adds just enough of a special touch to leave an impression.

To pit these pot pies against one another, I purchased a Costco pot pie on a recent visit to the warehouse and ordered a pot pie from Sam's Club to be delivered via Instacart. I warmed these up over the course of two days. First, I cooked up and sampled the Costco pot pie, and the following day was all about Sam's Club. On the third day, since I had so much left over (even after my family was eating the pies, too) I tried them side by side as leftovers. Ultimately, I was selecting which pot pie had better flavor based on how enjoyable the filling and crust were of each pie. Other important factors I noticed were texture that didn't feel too soupy and a presentation that was a little more interesting to look at.

A meal that is ready to cook at home should feel relaxing and even fun, not like a chore. After all, it's saving you time to spend doing other things you love. Although I didn't change anything about the pot pies before making them, there are plenty of hacks you can do to make store-bought pot pies even better.