Carrefour Taipei – What to Expect on Your Visit

Carrefour in Taipei for lack of a better way for describing it is kind of like the Target and Wal-Mart of Taiwan. Originating from France, Carrefour is pronounced “Car 4” even though many people pronounce it like “Care 4” and has 76 locations spread across Taiwan, with 10 in Taipei City and 17 in New Taipei City. To see the locations of the stores in Chinese (no English at the time of this writing) you can check it out here.

The store is divided into 2 main sections: A lower level filed with household goods and an upper level with groceries. Each store is different in terms of who it cooperates with in the building such as restaurants and other shop owners like tea dealers and furniture shops, but overall Carrefour only has two levels of actual products sold.

Food

The following food can be purchased at Carrefour:

Fruits

Oranges, bananas, apples, strawberries, blueberries, pineapples, and watermelons among many others can be found in the store’s produce section. If you are lucky you will find frozen berries in the frozen section that include blackberries, which is the only place we have ever seen blackberries for sale in Taipei.

Vegetables

Pretty much all the standard vegetables you can think of can be found in all Carrefour locations, including carrots, lettuce, broccoli etc. In terms of frozen vegetables, unfortunately this has not caught on in Taipei that much and typically you can only find bags of frozen pees and chopped up carrot bits in Carrefour. Costco on the other hand has frozen vegetable bags.

Western food

You can find a number of foods from the West, including chips, soda, milk powder, peanut butter and jelly, pickles, oatmeal, cereal, candy and an assortment of pastas. There is also an assortment of ice cream in the frozen section as well as meats such as bacon and chicken bites. For the cheese lover, there is a wide assortment of low-end cheeses (for higher-end ones you need to go to Sogo) as well as yogurt and chocolate mousse. Milk and eggs are widely available, and milk in Taiwan can be quite expensive. There is also a wide variety of Western beer such as Guinness, Blue Girl and a surprisingly decent range of Belgium beer. All of these foods are the cheaper alternatives to the Western products found in Sogo, which we should note prides itself a bit too much on overpriced imported food that is promoted as high-end goods when in fact they are nothing to brag about. A good example is Shasta Soda.

Stationary Goods

For those looking to get all your living materials such as lamps and bedding etc. there are two places people divide their shopping – Ikea and Carrefour. We recommend Ikea for bedding, pillows, lamps, glasses, silverware and sofas, but for other everyday items like pens, post-it stamps and paper clips etc. Carrefour is your best bet.

The store has everything you need at a cheap price when it comes to kitchen utensils, pots and pans, coffee makers and anything related to writing such as notepads and pens. There are an assortment of plugins, comforters, sandwich makers, coffee makers, water heaters, dehumidifiers and water purifiers. The list goes on.

In terms of games, you can find chess, checkers, Frisbees, golf clubs, cards and board games in addition to soccer balls, basketballs, baseballs and volleyballs. There are even scooters and bikes for sale as well as TVs, massage chairs, speakers, DVD players and many other electronics. If you want to get picky though you can consider 3C in Taiwan as an alternative store for purchasing electronics and finding the cheapest deals.

The great thing about Carrefour is that they actually take debit and credit cards! If you haven’t stayed in Taiwan for a while you may not know this but many stores do not accept cards and only cash. Paying with either a local or foreign card is so convenient and taken for granted over here that it makes us want to go back again and again.