The One Complaint Costco Shoppers Have About This Giant Chicken Pot Pie

Costco shoppers are rediscovering the warehouse grocer's giant chicken pot pie. A recent post from Taste of Home called the take-and-bake pie "new," when, in fact, it has been around for quite a few years, as a 2013 post from CostcoCouple proves.

The chicken pot pie is classic Costco — hard-core comfort food at a ridiculously large size and an affordable price. Each weighs around five pounds and costs $3.49 a pound. So you can feed a family of four dinner for a half a week off this beast for less than $20. YouTube food reviewers Chef Dawg and The Johnsons liked Costco's chicken pot pie well enough. But if anyone has a complaint about the dish, it's that it's too salty.

Costco promises one and a half pounds of chicken breast meat, straight off their rotisserie chickens. The pot pie also has peas and carrots, and the crust is the same one you'd find around a Costco apple pie. Judging by the taste, you can definitely add salt to the ingredient list, too.

One Reddit user started a thread on the Costco subreddit by saying their chicken pot pie was so salty that they wondered whether someone had put too much salt in it by mistake. Costco store employees in the comments couldn't really get to the bottom of the salt question because all of the pie's insides except the chicken come into the stores premade, in a bag. A lot of commenters agreed with the original post, though, declaring Costco's chicken pot pie "way too salty" or "super salty."

"... [T]he salt content seems to be a crapshoot," another Reddit commenter said. "I probably get one a month-ish when they're around. Most of the time they're fine, but sometimes we go to eat it and can barely finish it off because of how crazy salty it is." The website Costcuisine, which reviews Costco food, gave the chicken pot pie a mixed review and said the pie was "a little on the overly salty side."

So how much salt is in a Costco chicken pot pie, anyway? MyFitnessPal has nutrition facts for several examples of the Costco chicken pot pie, and they all seem to be consistent with each other. We chose one that weighed more than five pounds, to make sure we were getting information about the big version, not the smaller Costco pot pie we've seen around the internet, particularly in Canada. By selecting the whole pie under "serving size," which, in this case, weighed 95.4 ounces (almost six pounds), we got a salt content of 15,120 milligrams. Divide that into six very generous one-pound servings, and each plateful has 2,520 mg of sodium — more than the CDC-recommended daily intake of 2,300 mg.

So yes, objectively speaking, the Costco chicken pot pie does have a lot of salt. While it might have too much salt according to government health guidelines, not everyone would agree after all that the pie is too salty to enjoy. "I think the saltiness is about right," one of the Reddit commenters said. "Personal taste, I guess."