Growing up, we had Nabisco's Nilla Wafers around the house frequently. Sometimes there was a competing brand (Keebler, maybe?), but it didn't have a distinctive, memorable product name. So Nilla Wafers has, for something like 50 years, been my Platonic ideal of a vanilla wafer. This Trader Joe's contender is clearly quite different, as you can see at a glance. Can it knock the king off of his throne?
No.
Now, I'll admit that if I had come to the comparison as a vanilla wafer virgin, I might well choose TJ's. There is a distinct air of quality about them.
But my main stumbling block is that they're very soft, whereas I've come to expect vanilla wafers to be crispy. Oddly, I started to like the TJ's cookies a little better after the container had been sitting on my counter for a few weeks, and they dried out some, simply because they began to more closely resemble the texture I'm accustomed to.
As a secondary issue, they're less vanilla-y than Nilla Wafers. Admittedly, this is probably because TJ's uses actual vanilla beans, while Nabisco uses what they will only disclose as "natural and artificial flavors." They can cram a helluva lot of artificial vanilla flavor in--and I like it. Maybe I shouldn't, but I do.
I readily concede that my preference here may be akin to a bumpkin saying, "Yeah, I think Wal-Mart wine in a box is way tastier than that fancy-schmancy French shit." But that's my opinion and I'm sticking to it.
Will I buy it again?
No. In fact, after I had eaten maybe a third of the tub, they sat on my counter for a few weeks. I kept picking other snacks over them. I finally realized that that meant that I really didn't want to eat any more of them, so after one more sampling (as mentioned above), they went back to the store for a refund.
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