You may laugh now, but wait till the apocalypse and see how much you miss potato salad.

I just went sailing for a few days. On the small sailboat, we don’t have a fridge onboard. Stuff like this can be stored in room temperature, so I can definitely see the appeal for it.

I've actually tried this brand before and it's not bad! It's a much different type of potato salad than the fresh kind they sell in the deli aisle. I don't think they're meant to be direct competition for each other

I have a very elderly relative. If you can only eat food that is not too firm, and you want easy-to-prepare stuff that you can keep on the shelf, and your tastes are kind of old fashioned, this sounds great.

Portability and stability. Same as any canned good.

Hell, some things are better canned because once the process is done, it's essentially exactly where you want it and stays there. Cranberry jelly, tomatoes, pineapple for deserts (seriously, it can be much better than fresh for some applications), peaches for some uses, even corn can be better at some things because it's canned. There's others, but it would get silly.

Now, I tend to agree that this isn't something I would stock up on, what with fresh being relatively easy to get if I was unable to make my own. But, if I lived by myself? If it was decent, it might be a better choice just because it's a smaller batch size. Less chance of wasting resource.

Canned goods are great, they last, keep the nutritional values, packaging can be recycled, etc

The 'they last' means also less trips to the store, and less logistics is good for everyone and everything.

Unless canned food is acidic, then the cans are layered in plastics & are basically plastic bottles with extra steps.

Perhaps there is even an argument to be made how a large scale industrial processing can be (which doesn't man is, but in proper countries it should be) much better, not only precise, but clean, with in some cases inherently far better ingredient quality (at least because of timing the ingredients), and more efficient too. It just takes less to implement an extra precaution or control in such an environment vs a big kitchen (or just someone mixing the ingredients at the store).

Often canned goods use no or at least much less preservatives compared to 'fresh' counterparts, simply bcs they just aren't needed (and either way it's cheaper to perfect the mechanical preservation processes than adding extra stuff in).

Also I really wanna open that can now :).

Long term storage for emergencies, camping.

I would assume for increased shelf life. This is German style potato salad and I have seen the cans in stores for at least 30 years.

As a German I would suggest to burn these stores down.

This would go great with canned dumplings. Just kidding. Or am I?

It's German potato salad which is even less salad like than American styled potato salad.

I'm just waiting for canned bread.

First of all .. ew. I don't know who this is for honestly. Maybe it's one of those things that was used during war times that's now sold in stores because why not? Second, we have lots of Krogers in the US and they are currently trying to merge with Albertsons which would essentially create a monopoly on grocery stores. Let's all hope that doesn't go through.

A couple friends and I would get together for drinks, we all love to cook, one topic that frequently came up was 'stuff you hated as a kid'. Then we would meet the next week and present a good version of that dish. German potato salad was the only thing no one could make edible, it just sucks as a dish.

So Kroger decided to make it worse I guess?

That does seem gross and weird.

I will note that this is German potato salad, which does not have mayo and instead has vinegar, so it's not quite as disgusting as I first thought.

Still, the only use cases I can think of would be camping and end of world prepping.

I can easily see how something like canned potato salad could be convenient to someone who doesn't want to spend time cooking and/or doesn't plan their meals much. Some people buy fresh produce or foods that will last just a couple of weeks in the fridge, they don't eat it, they throw it away. If you are like this, and only eat potato a couple times a year then you can just stock up on a few cans and not deal with the fresh option which needs planning. You can freeze fresh salad you say? Yes, but sometimes you don't want to deal with the thawing.

In short this serves the same purpose as canned beans or any other canned meal.