What To Buy At Restaurant Depot

Forget Costco—wholesale store Restaurant Depot takes "buying in bulk" to a new level. This is a place where shopping carts are replaced with flatbeds, onions are sold in 50-pound bags and Instant Pots are as abundant as bunches of bananas. There is, sadly, a catch: Only restaurant and business owners can gain access to the towering aisles of this culinary wonderland. So consider this your reason to open a restaurant.

Here are 10 cost-saving items worth a membership to Restaurant Depot. 

Be it an ice cream social, birthday party or just stocking up for a nightly ice cream habit, these three-gallon tubs are game changers. To put things into perspective, one massive $20 tub is half the price of a small Carvel sheet cake, which serves only 16.

Imagine: a never-ending supply of breaded eggplant cutlets in the freezer. The key to easy weeknight dinners. For $18, one gets five pounds, perfect for crowd-pleasing eggplant Parm and vegetarian Italian sandwiches. 

This go-to addition to fruity smoothies can be pricier at the grocery store than the smoothie ingredients themselves. Here, a 12-pack is just $14, calculating to just a little over $1 a bottle. 

The frozen Atlantic salmon at Restaurant Depot is a dream come true for salmon lovers: 10 eight-ounce fillets for just $50. On Amazon Fresh, one pound runs about $20, double Restaurant Depot's price. 

Maybe you're already planning next summer's barbecues, or maybe you're like us and are simply obsessed with all things pickles. Either way, these gallon jars of both kosher dill pickle chips and whole pickles would be great to keep around. Bonus: They go for around $4 each—meaning way more brine for your buck. Not to mention all the wonderful ways that brining liquid could be used in cocktails, salad dressings and even bread recipes.

Nothing runs a grocery bill up quite like the deli bar. Whether it's kalamata olives we're adding to our salads, pastas and chicken dishes, or whole queen olives for cocktails, these bites can easily upgrade any dish. You can typically find a seven-ounce jar of pitted olives for around $5 to $6, but at Restaurant Depot, an 80-ounce jar goes for less than $15.

It seems we can never find bottles of these pantry staples big enough to supply our salad dressing and cooking needs. Restaurant Depot has three-liter cans of cold-pressed EVOO for less than $20 and five-liter bottles of chef's-quality balsamic vinegar for about $9. Not impressed? A can of olive oil that size on Peapod runs for about $34.  

Nuts are a huge win when shopping at Restaurant Depot. Our love for everything from pecans to famously pricey pine nuts is tough to sustain when they cost so much, but a membership here would help fuel those high-protein snack cravings for less.

Why drain money at coffee shops when a box of 42 K-Cups costs about $12 at Restaurant Depot? (A typical 36-count box costs about $22.) Here's the math: Instead of paying $0.62 each, Restaurant Depot charges about $0.29 each. That's a whole lot of caffeine for a whole lot less.

'Tis the season for adding cinnamon, cumin and curry to almost everything you cook. Enter: five-pound tubs of spices for $17 apiece. A one-ounce bottle of cinnamon costs about $2 at a local grocery store, meaning if you were to buy five pounds, you would spend about $80.