FOOD NEWS
Do Costco Food Samplers Actually Work For Costco?
By Angel Albring
Shopping at Costco has its own benefits; it will get you access to specialty items, big discounts, bulk buying, and all the free samples you could want. However, you may have wondered at some point if the people who hand out all those free samples actually work for Costco.
The answer to that is no. These sample-slinging employees work for a third-party vendor called Club Demonstration Services (CDS), which Costco calls their “preferred in-house event marketing provider.” They provide free samples, along with product demonstrations, to encourage shoppers to buy more products from Costco.
While the CDS contractors don’t work for Costco, they do keep things strictly in line with Costco's food safety standards. For example, they will replace samples that have been touched but not consumed by the shoppers and disallow unsupervised children from tasting the samples, just in case they have food allergies that they might be unaware of.