The best groceries aren’t always the most famous. Sometimes they’re the stunning pancake mix you’d never find on a traditional Big Grocery shelf, the unbelievably delicious sausage from a family-owned brand you haven’t heard of yet, or the flavor-packed butter that makes you stop and ask, wait—why hasn’t this existed until now?
That’s what the Best of Misfits Awards are all about. To be honest, every single product in our store already made the cut. We don’t carry anything that doesn’t clear our bar on flavor, quality, and impact on the food system. So when we say something is a Best of Misfits winner, we’re not just saying it’s good. We’re saying it’s the best of the best, the standout among a shelf full of standouts.
For the second year running, we went digging through our entire grocery selection—produce, snacks, meat & seafood, pantry staples, our own brand (Odds & Ends), and beyond—to crown the products our team and our customers can’t stop reaching for. This year we curated more winners across more categories than ever before, and every single one earned its spot for good reasons: it tastes incredible, it comes from a producer worth knowing, and you almost certainly wouldn’t have found it anywhere else.
So check out the winners, then hit our store and add to cart to find out what you’ve been missing.
Core Product Awards
The everyday staples, snacks, and sips that earned their place in the rotation.
Best Flavor: Stone & Skillet English Muffins
This is the muffin that makes people ask what’s different about it before they’ve even finished chewing. Griddle-baked with the deep, craggy nooks and crannies that were built to trap butter (and never let it go), it’s got a tangy, yeasty depth that the shrink-wrapped stuff at the big chains just doesn’t get to. Split it, toast it, and watch it go from breakfast afterthought to the best part of the meal. Taste the classic plain, the just-sweet-enough strawberry, and be on the lookout for a lemon blueberry flavor coming soon!
Best Packaging: Joon Dill Pickle Pistachios
Yes, this one is a winner for its looks, but what’s inside is just as special. Built on a 300-year-old family pistachio recipe, these are brined, not just seasoned, in verjus, vinegar, lime, and dill until the tang works all the way through the nut, not just the shell. The result is a genuinely bold, deli-pickle punch with the same creamy nut flavor and satisfying crunch pistachio lovers already prize. No seed oils, no artificial flavors, just a family method that’s been refined for centuries.
Best Snack: Petit Pot + Misfits Market Upcycled Vanilla Rice Pudding
This one has a Misfits fingerprint on it: it was born from our own Upcycling Challenge, where Petit Pot pitched us the idea of folding broken rice kernels—perfectly good rice that gets tossed out during milling for being the wrong shape—into their classic French-style pudding. It won a permanent spot in our store because the pudding itself is silky, lightly sweet, and vanilla-forward in the way only real French pastry technique delivers. You genuinely can’t tell it’s made from “broken” rice, which is exactly the point.
Best Beverage: Rambler Sparkling Water
Beloved in its home state of Texas, Rambler skips artificial sweeteners and uses a proprietary limestone mineral blend with just enough real fruit flavor to feel like a treat. It’s crisp and has the kind of assertive carbonation that holds up long after you crack it open. The Original is our standby, but don’t miss out on seasonal flavors like Satsuma and Wild Cherry.
Best Pantry Staple: L’Isolina Spaghetti Dust
This isn’t pasta, but it’s the shortcut to the best pasta dish you’ll make all week. A ready-to-go blend of toasted garlic, Calabrian chile, dried parsley, and sea salt, Spaghetti Dust turns a drained pot of pasta and a glug of good olive oil into a genuine aglio e olio e peperoncino in about 90 seconds flat. It’s built by a Long Island pasta maker as the “nothing in the fridge” emergency dish their own mother used to make, and it’s just as good dusted over roasted vegetables, popcorn, grilled fish, or steak.
Best Weeknight Hero: Summ! Foods BBQ Pork Bao Buns
Char siu bao is a Cantonese dim sum classic for a reason: pillowy, steamed dough wrapped around sweet-savory barbecue pork with real depth from soy, hoisin, and five-spice. Summ!’s version steams up ultra-soft in under six minutes, no dim sum cart or dumpling-folding skills required. You’ll be shocked at the restaurant-style quality you can whip up in your own kitchen.
Best Odds & Ends Product: Odds & Ends Cold Pressed Orange Juice
Sure, we’re a bit biased when it comes to the brand we’ve created ourselves, but we swear, you’ll taste the quality difference in our version vs what’s at Big Grocery in the first sip. Cold-pressed instead of heat-pasteurized, this juice keeps the bright, just-squeezed flavor and the pulp-forward texture that flash-pasteurized store brands flatten out. Plus, by using the not-quite-perfect-looking oranges, we save 150,000+ pounds of oranges from the landfill and 150,000+ pounds from animal feed each year.
Best Fruit: Jam Grapes
These grapes taste like someone bred a Concord grape and a candy shop and got the good parts of both. They’re intensely sweet, almost jammy, with a snap that regular table grapes don’t have. It’s the kind of fruit that gets kids (and adults) eating a whole bag in one sitting without anyone having to be convinced.
Most Flavorful Veggie: Nature Fresh Farms Mystery Cherry Tomatoes on the Vine
Greenhouse-grown for consistent sweetness season-round, these tomatoes stay on the vine until they’re fully ripe instead of being picked green and gassed to color later, which is exactly why they taste like actual tomato instead of watery filler. Snackable straight off the vine, no salt required. We carry a rotating variety, so the fun is in the surprise: you never know exactly which cherry tomatoes will land in your box, but you know they’ll be snackable straight off the vine, no salt required.
Discovery & Innovation Awards
The hidden gems, the hard-to-finds, and the brands Big Grocery would never carry.
Best Hidden Gem: La Rossi Margherita Pizza
Founded by a Bologna, Italy-born food entrepreneur with two decades in sustainable sourcing, La Rossi set out to prove a frozen pizza could taste like it came out of a brick oven. The 10″ crust is hand-stretched from a blend of organic stone-ground flour, fermented overnight for real depth, then topped with organic tomatoes, NYC mozzarella, and fresh basil before it’s blast-frozen to lock in quality.
Fastest to Disappear: Cheddies Spicy Cheddar Crackers
Cheddies skips the powdered “cheese flavor” that most crackers rely on and starts with whole-block cheddar sourced from regenerative dairy farms. They use four times the cheese and contain twice the protein of the leading brands, by their own count. The result is a genuinely crispy, genuinely cheesy cracker with real heat in the Spicy Cheddar variety, not just a dusting of chili powder on top.
Best Hard-to-Find Product: HEYDOH Silky Soy Sauce
A Brooklyn-based small brand, HEYDOH uses whole, single-origin Taiwanese black soybeans, a rarer varietal bred specifically for fermentation and naturally higher in protein than the common yellow soybean that most soy sauce starts with. It’s brewed twice, first in salt water and then in soy sauce, yet surprisingly has half the sodium of the big brands, which means you can actually taste the layers of toasted grain and caramel instead of just salt.
Best Upcycled Story: Odds & Ends Truffle Mushroom Mezzaluna Ravioli
We love anything that’s upcycled, but this one is a fave because it does triple duty: rescued ingredients, zero-waste production, and a genuinely craveable truffle-mushroom filling wrapped in tender, half-moon pasta. It’s rich, earthy, and restaurant-worthy on its own merits, with the added win of doing real good for the food system.
Best Small Brand: Lottie’s Smoked Signature Sausage
Sisters Cassie and Chelsey Maschhoff grew up on their family’s sixth-generation hog farm before building Lottie’s—named for their family’s matriarch. The Lottie itself is made from whole-muscle pork loin and shoulder (no fillers, no mystery trimmings, no artificial anything), seasoned with nutmeg, paprika, and coriander, and smoked to a snap-when-you-bite-it finish. It’s fully cooked, so a quick sear in a splash of water or beer is all it takes to get that signature caramelized crust. This is exactly the kind of small-brand story that deserves a bigger stage, and we’re proud to help give it one.
Favorite Mystery Item: Season’s Best Mystery Melon
Nobody knows exactly which variety they’re getting until they open the box, which is the entire appeal. It’s the same jackpot-feeling delight that makes our mystery bundles so beloved, just shrunk down into a single melon. Sweet, juicy, and genuinely a surprise every time.
Signature Misfits Awards
Our most prestigious honors. The products and brands redefining what a grocery run can be.
Customer Choice Award — [Coming soon!]
This one’s up to you. We’re tallying the votes from our Instagram Story polls and email voting right now, and the winner will be crowned by the people who matter most—our customers. Cast your vote and check back soon to see who takes it.
The Misfits Discovery Award: KiuKiu Ube Mochi Pancake & Waffle Mix
Founder John Liu grew up in Taiwan obsessed with “QQ”—the bouncy, chewy texture found in mochi and boba—but couldn’t find anything like it when he moved to the U.S. So he built it himself: a sweet-rice-flour pancake and waffle mix that delivers a genuinely chewy, melt-in-your-mouth bite. The ube flavor gets its vivid purple color and subtly sweet flavor from organic ube grown in the Philippines, and it’s naturally gluten-free, made in small batches in San Diego.
The Better Grocery Award: Niman Ranch Bacon Ends and Pieces
Niman Ranch has spent decades building a network of independent farmers raising pigs outdoors or in deeply bedded pens, without gestation crates, added hormones, or antibiotics. The kind of sourcing standards most bacon on the market simply doesn’t meet. Ends and Pieces takes the same thick-cut, hickory-smoked bacon from those farms and gives you the flavorful trim pieces at a better price and lower waste footprint, perfect for crumbling into carbonara, dressing a Brussels sprouts sheet pan, or rendering down for the fat alone.
Breakout Brand of the Year: Pistakio Creamy Pistachio Nut Butter Spread
Co-founders Fran Voit and Nico Buffo built Pistakio out of a college capstone project after noticing pistachios were treated as a snack-only nut in the U.S., despite being a staple condiment across Italian cuisine. Made with just five real ingredients and California-grown pistachios, the creamy spread delivers a true toasted, nutty-sweet pistachio flavor with a texture smooth enough to drizzle. In under two years, it’s gone from farmers’ market pop-up to shelves in hundreds of stores, and we’re so proud to carry it at Misfits Market.
The Next Big Thing in Grocery: Churn Flavored Butters
Churn starts with 84%-butterfat, grass-fed European-style butter and folds in chef-made components: slow-roasted garlic and caramelized shallots for Garlic & Shallot, Grade A maple syrup and Ceylon cinnamon for Maple & Cinnamon. It’s rich enough to eat off a spoon, but built to melt over a seared steak, sauté a pan of vegetables, or turn plain toast into something worth waking up for.
Shop the winners
Every winner is waiting for you on our storefront. Whether you’re here for a new weeknight go-to, a snack you’ll hide from your roommates, or a butter that’ll change your morning toast forever—this is the good stuff, all in one place.
Shop the Best of Misfits winners and don’t forget to cast your vote for the Customer Choice Award. The people have spoken before, and they’re about to speak again.
Keep Reading: The Best of Misfits Awards 2025