8 Grocery Smoked Salmon Brands Ranked From Worst To Best

Smoked salmon is just one of the delicious ways that salmon is prepared around the world. The art of smoking salmon was developed by indigenous people in what is now Alaska who used brining and smoke to preserve fish and imbue flavor.

Though the two types of preparation are often used interchangeably, there's actually a big difference between them, resulting in lox or smoked salmon. The brining process that produces lox doesn't involve smoke at all — the salmon is instead cured in salt. Over the years, the smoking method has traveled around the world, with new traditions emerging in various regions. In America, lox is generally harder to come by, and many people actually have smoked salmon on their mind when they order lox.

Smoked salmon is readily accessible at many local grocery stores, but not all brands are created equal. Buying any pre-packaged seafood at the grocery store can be a gamble (check out our guide on the best imitation crab brands). To help you avoid that costly trial and error, we tried eight Atlantic smoked salmon brands available at Kroger, Albertsons, and Walmart stores in Montana — see our methodology slide at the end for more details on our ranking process. Here is the best and worst smoked salmon you can buy in stores.

Waterfront Bistro Hardwood Smoked Nova Atlantic Salmon is a brand that can be purchased at Safeway, Tom Thumb, Acme, and other stores under the Albertsons brand umbrella. Unfortunately, this item is basically everything you don't want from a grocery store seafood purchase.

From the outset, this product makes a bad impression. Both the smell and taste are unusually fishy, which overwhelms any smoke flavor that might be imbued by the hardwood smoking process. It's the kind of aroma that makes you immediately question whether you should finish eating it or just toss it in the trash.

The taste is outdone only by the texture. This salmon tastes like it's been frozen and thawed one too many times, leaving it with a mushy, overly soft mouthfeel that's extremely off-putting. With such a terrible combination of both taste and texture, this was a no-brainer for last place out of the options I tried. If you're shopping for smoked salmon at the grocery store, I would highly recommend you stay away from this one.

Latitude 45 is a seafood brand available at Walmart. Smoked salmon is among the most bougie foods you can buy at Walmart, but when it comes to this product, Walmart falls a bit short.

The first thing you'll notice upon tasting the Latitude 45 smoked Atlantic salmon is its rubbery texture. It feels more like deli meat that's been sitting out too long than a premium seafood pick. If that isn't enough to put you off, there's also a slight fishy aftertaste. The flavor is milder, meaning there isn't even any nice smoky essence to help you forget about those other two aspects.

For a product that positions itself as upscale, the Latitude 45 salmon just never delivers on the experience. It didn't give me the urge to spit it out, like the Waterfront Bistro one did, so it doesn't quite get the last-place spot — but given the other great options we have on this list, I would leave this brand behind when shopping for smoked salmon at the grocery store.

I had high hopes for the LASCco Smoked Atlantic Nova Salmon, which I purchased from Albertsons. First of all, the packaging looks very classic and elegant with its gold embellishments and clean design. When I pulled this salmon out of the packaging, it was beautiful.

Unlike the other jagged-edged salmons on our list, the LASCco slices were long, slender, and perfectly proportioned in rectangular ribbons. The fish was marbled, giving it the look of bacon strips. Unfortunately, the taste did not live up to the aesthetics on this product. It had hardly any smoke flavor at all — in fact, the flavor was fishy and acidic, almost with a hint of citrus. I love citrus, but this wasn't what I was expecting from smoked salmon. The texture was chewy even though the slices were quite thin.

If you were hosting an eyes-only dinner party where no one planned to eat the food, this is a beautiful choice. But if you'd like to enjoy a tasty smoked salmon, I'd leave this one behind.

Private Selection is a premium store brand available at Kroger stores. Although Private Selection ranked high in our list of the best grocery store private labels, this smoked salmon may not be one of the best items.

When I first opened the packaging, the Private Selection smoked salmon seemed promising — there was a strong smell of sweet, oaky hardwood, which is always a good sign if you're looking for a flavorful smoked salmon. However, the smoke flavor ended up tasting artificial and overpowering the tender fish. The salmon had a good salt level, but the texture was a bit chewy.

For those reasons, the Private Selection smoked salmon gets a middle of the road ranking from me. It's not terrible, but I wouldn't make it my go-to, either. For a supposedly "premium" label that I frequently buy products from, it's safe to say this was a disappointing showing from Private Selection.

The Echo Falls Smoked Norwegian Atlantic Salmon is another brand available at Kroger and its affiliate stores (the chain appears under different names in different states, including store names like Ralph's, Fred Meyer, Harris Teeter, and more). The product name simply indicates that it's smoked in a Norwegian style, which usually indicates a cold-smoking process and a milder flavor — this seafood brand sources and smokes its salmon in the northwestern U.S. 

This salmon gets points for its smoky flavor, which was spot on. However, I found myself wishing there was more salt to really bring out and accent those flavors. After all, smoked salmon is still meant to be a salty food, even if it's not brined in salt like lox is.

On top of the somewhat bland flavor, the texture was quite stringy with what seemed to be tendons or fat disrupting the eating experience. Overall, I would leave this Echo Falls smoked salmon on the shelf, especially with better options available at many Kroger stores.

Sold at Albertsons, this Acme smoked salmon has packaging that advertises it as Scottish-style, which usually means it is smoked slower than Norwegian styles. The Scottish style is also smoked using oak woods, meaning it tends to have a bolder flavor.

I'm not sure if I agree with the bold claims, but I still enjoyed this smoked salmon. The best thing about the Acme brand smoked salmon is its texture. The thicker fish slices are tender and easy to chew, with a fall-apart quality that indicates they've been smoked to perfection. The flavor is milder, without an abundance of smokiness, which seems to contradict the Scottish-style claims from its packaging.

All in all, this is a solid smoked salmon that I wouldn't turn my nose up at. But I prefer a slightly stronger flavor, so this product rings in at No. 3. There are two others that are better.

Relying on the packaging colors alone, you can tell that Blue Hill Bay is another Scottish smoked salmon — and it lives up to the bold flavor profile that the style promises. Long, hearty slices of salmon greet you inside this package, which can be found at your local Kroger affiliate.

The Blue Hill Bay salmon doesn't have a fishy aftertaste like some of the others on the lineup. The smoke level was Goldilocks — not too much, not too little. Though the slices were thin enough to be easily piled up on your toast of choice, they felt substantial, with a tender meaty texture.

If you're a fan of less salt, this is probably your ideal choice. This salmon was less salty than I expected given the traditional salt curing method for smoked salmon and lox, so it didn't quite reach my top ranking, but the flavor was good nonetheless. I wouldn't hesitate to recommend this smoked salmon, and I think it would be the perfect umami addition to a grilled cheese sandwich.

The Foppen smoked salmon is the most expensive brand that we tried, and that's for a reason. This package, available at Kroger stores, is larger than the others, containing over 8 ounces of "toast sized" sliced fish in three different flavors. That's great value for the price. To keep the comparison fair, we tasted only the traditional variety from this pack. It also came with a packet of unique honey-mustard dill sauce that was a refreshing and slightly sweet addition to the salmon.

Even without the sauce, though, this Foppen smoked salmon was a standout. It had a robust flavor with the perfect amount of smoke and salt and just a touch of sweetness. The texture was ideal: The slices were a good thickness, the salmon was tender but not mushy, and it almost had a melt-in-your-mouth quality. It definitely tasted the freshest out of all the salmon we tried.

This smoked salmon tasted great on crostinis, and it would also be the perfect choice to make a smoked salmon appetizer served on cucumbers. Overall, the taste, texture, and value of this smoked salmon make Foppen our recommendation for the best smoked salmon you can buy in the grocery store.

To rank these store-bought smoked salmon brands from worst to best, we purchased eight brands that were available locally at Kroger, Walmart, and Albertsons stores in Montana. These brands were selected based upon their moderate price and widespread availability in national grocery chains.

We tested only Atlantic salmon in traditional flavors to ensure a fair comparison. Each fish was tasted plain with no toppings to ensure no interference from outside flavors. In our ranking, we took into account value, flavor, texture, and appearance of the salmon. These rankings are the personal experience of the author; your results may vary.