The Only Gluten-Free Bagel You Can Get At Trader Joe's

One of the most fun things about shopping at Trader Joe's is the variety of items it offers, which is due to how frequently it rotates through a stock of limited-time items. Some groceries, however, are on the "permanent menu," like the ones on our list of must-buy items for first-time Trader Joe's customers. While the permanent list is fairly extensive, it does have some surprising shortfalls. For one thing, it seems there's but a single variety of gluten-free bagels on offer. No, you can't get plain, or onion, or blueberry. Instead, your only choice for a gf option is something called an "almost everything" bagel.

If the word "almost" gives you pause in a product description, you're not alone in this. How often have we (not) been fooled by something that's "almost" like butter or "very nearly" sugar? In this case, though, the word doesn't refer to any artificial ingredients but rather to the fact that the seasoning blend is somewhat out of the ordinary. An everything bagel is typically coated in dehydrated onion, poppy seeds, sesame seeds, garlic, and salt, and these same ingredients can be found in Trader Joe's Everything But the Bagel seasoning blend. The "almost everything" variant, on the other hand, reserves the garlic and salt for flavoring the bagel dough and substitutes quinoa for sesame. As neither sesame seeds nor quinoa contain gluten, these changes to the seasoning mix don't seem to have anything to do with the bagel's gluten-free status. Instead, they're just another Trader Joe's mystery.

Most Trader Joe's stores are significantly smaller (maybe just one-fifth of the size) of a standard supermarket, so it comes as no surprise to find that their selection of gluten-free products is limited in more ways than just bagel varieties. While the grocery chain's gluten-free mini sheet cake was introduced to great fanfare in 2025, it too is available in only one flavor (yellow).

If you search for gluten-free products on Trader Joe's website, you may be heartened to find almost 300 listed. If you take a closer look, though, you'll find that there are really only about two dozen specifically gluten-free items such as cookies, bread, and crackers. The rest of the list consists of such products as meat, vegetables, yogurt, and even soap, all items that wouldn't be likely to contain gluten in the first place. Still, while Trader Joe's may not be a one-stop shop for all your gluten-free needs (it doesn't offer gluten-free flour, for example), this doesn't mean it's non-celiac-friendly. For a small store, it does what it can to cater to its gluten-free customers