Where to Buy Mexican Ingredients in Glasgow and Edinburgh

If you want to cook Mexican food in Scotland's two largest cities, the short answer is this: there are a handful of dedicated Mexican shops, and a wider ring of international grocers that fill the gaps. Our directory lists 11 shops in Glasgow and 6 in Edinburgh. This guide sorts them into the specialists, the refill and online options, and the general grocers, and then turns the sorting into a practical shopping list.

Every address, rating and set of hours below is pulled from our directory, with Google ratings as held in October 2026. We have not checked each shop's shelves ourselves, and stock in specialist food shops changes from week to week, so for a specific item, such as a particular dried chilli, it is worth ringing ahead.

The Mexican specialists

One Mexican grocery business has a branch in each city. Both are filed in our directory as Mexican shops and both belong to the same business.

Lupe Pintos Glasgow

Address: 313 Great Western Road, G4 9HR
Opening hours (directory listing): Mon–Sat 10:00–18:00 · Sun 12:30–17:30
Website: lupepintos.com

The Glasgow shop is on Great Western Road at Kelvinbridge, at the eastern edge of the West End. Our restaurant directory also carries an entry at the same address under Lupe Pinto's, which is why you may see it in restaurant searches too; we treat it as a shop.

Lupe Pintos Edinburgh

Address: 24 Leven Street, EH3 9LJ
Opening hours (directory listing): Mon–Sat 10:00–18:00 · Sun 12:30–17:30
Website: lupepintos.com

The Edinburgh branch is on Leven Street in Tollcross, on the bus routes south of the West End. If you live in Edinburgh, this is the address to try first for tinned chipotles, masa harina and dried chillies.

Edinburgh also has a small group of independent shops that sell Mexican food or goods alongside other things.

Weigh To Go

Address: 27 Crighton Place, EH7 4NY
Opening hours (directory listing): Mon–Fri 10:00–19:00 · Sat 10:00–18:00 · Sun 12:00–18:00
Website: weightogo.co.uk

A refill shop off Leith Walk that our directory lists for Mexican goods as well as its refill range. The same business runs an online shop, WeighToGo Online, which is useful if you are outside the city.

Caoba

Address: 20 Anderson Pl, Edinburgh EH6 5FR
Google rating: 4.9 from 119 reviews (as held in our directory, October 2026)
Opening hours (directory listing): Mon–Sat 09:30–16:00 · Sun closed
Website: caoba.co.uk

Caoba appears twice in our Edinburgh listings: this entry in Leith and a second, Caoba Edinburgh on Raeburn Place in Stockbridge. The Stockbridge listing is filed as a crafts and interiors shop rather than a grocer, so go there for decorations for a Día de Muertos table rather than for food.

International grocers that fill the gaps

Most of what a Mexican recipe asks for, such as dried beans, rice, limes, coriander, fresh chillies, avocados and a lot of the spices, is not specifically Mexican. In Glasgow and Edinburgh, the international grocers listed below are where many home cooks find it. Our directory files them alongside the Mexican shops, but they are general stores: we have not verified which Mexican products each one carries.

Glasgow

Shop	Address	Google rating (reviews)	Closed (listed hours)
Ganapathy Store	279 Maryhill Rd, Glasgow G20 7YA	4.1 (826)	none listed
Super Asia	326 Pollokshaws Rd, Glasgow G41 1QS	4.1 (474)	none listed
Suresh & Sons The Grocers	1081A Argyle St, Finnieston, Glasgow G3 8LZ	4.3 (225)	none listed
Ganapathy Store - Glasgow	1874 Paisley Rd W, Cardonald, Glasgow G52 3TN	4.6 (132)	none listed
Bab Al-Hara Markets 147	151 Oxford St, Glasgow G5 9JE	4.5 (130)	none listed
All In One International grocery and food store	269 High St, Glasgow G4 0QS	4.4 (120)	none listed
Polish Daisy	77 Calder St, Govanhill, Glasgow G42 7RR	4.6 (88)	none listed
River Nile Supermarket	27 Paisley Rd W, Kinning Park, Glasgow G51 1LF	4.8 (70)	none listed
Locavore Govanhill	349 Victoria Rd, Govanhill, Glasgow G42 7SA	4.5 (760)	none listed

Edinburgh

Shop	Address	Google rating (reviews)	Closed (listed hours)
Food Plus Grocery | Pewex Delicatessen	72 Niddrie Mains Rd, Edinburgh EH16 4BG	4.6 (775)	none listed
Global Foods	1a Norton Park, Edinburgh EH7 5RS	4.1 (433)	none listed

Two patterns are worth knowing. South Asian grocers usually carry fresh green chillies, coriander in big bunches, limes, whole spices and large bags of dried beans at better prices than the supermarkets. Eastern European and Middle Eastern shops are often the place to find soured cream, salty white cheeses and tinned goods that work as substitutes when Mexican cheese is not available. For the cheese question in particular, our guide to UK alternatives to Mexican cheeses goes through what melts and what crumbles.

A shopping list for a Scottish Mexican kitchen

It helps to split the list into what you buy at a specialist once in a while and what you can pick up anywhere every week.

From a Mexican specialist, or online

• Masa harina, the flour of nixtamalised maize. Nixtamalisation, cooking maize with lime, is one of the techniques UNESCO named when it added traditional Mexican cuisine to its intangible heritage list in 2010, and it is what makes a corn tortilla hold together. You cannot replace it with cornflour or polenta.
• Dried chillies: ancho, guajillo and pasilla cover most red sauces and stews; chipotle and árbol add smoke and heat. Look for pliable, not brittle, chillies.
• Chipotles in adobo, tinned. They keep for weeks in the fridge once decanted.
• Tinned tomatillos, for green salsas when fresh ones are not available, which in Scotland is most of the year.
• Mexican oregano, which tastes different from the Mediterranean kind.
• Hominy, tinned or dried, if you plan to make pozole. Pozole is a stew of hominy with pork or chicken, served as blanco, verde or rojo depending on the sauce; our red pozole recipe and green pozole recipe show both.

From the international grocer or supermarket

• Limes, coriander, white onions, garlic and fresh green chillies.
• Dried black and pinto beans, and long-grain rice.
• Avocados: buy them hard and ripen them in a paper bag at room temperature.
• Whole cumin, cloves, cinnamon sticks and black peppercorns, which turn up in many moles and adobos.
• Pork shoulder and chicken thighs, the cuts most Mexican braises are written for.

Cooking something more ambitious

A mole is the classic test of a Mexican pantry. Mole poblano, the classic version, comes from Puebla, and Oaxaca is often called the land of the seven moles. Every mole starts with dried chillies, usually two or more types, and the darker ones finish with chocolate. If you can find ancho, mulato and pasilla in one of the shops above, you have the core of most red and brown moles. Our chicken in mole sauce is a good first attempt, and the Oaxacan black mole is the long project.

For the full background on dried chillies and their heat levels in British terms, see our Mexican chilli heat scale, and for substitutions that work and those that do not, our guide to Mexican ingredient swaps in the UK.

When it is easier to eat out

Some dishes are hard to cook well at home in small quantities: al pastor needs a vertical spit, and birria rewards a long braise for a crowd. For those, our rankings of Mexican restaurants in Glasgow and Edinburgh, ordered by Google rating, are the companion to this guide.

Frequently asked questions

Is there a Mexican supermarket in Glasgow or Edinburgh?

Not a supermarket in the large sense, but both cities have a specialist Mexican grocer from the same business, listed above with their addresses and hours.

Can I buy fresh tomatillos in Scotland?

Rarely. Tinned tomatillos from a Mexican specialist are the reliable option for green salsa.

What can I use instead of Mexican cheese?

Salty white cheeses from Eastern European and Middle Eastern shops work as crumbling cheeses, and a mild melting cheese stands in for Oaxaca cheese. Our cheese guide explains the swaps.

Do these shops deliver?

Some have online shops; the website in each listing is the place to check. The full list of UK online sellers is in our shop directory.

Sources

• UNESCO, Traditional Mexican cuisine: ancestral, ongoing community culture, the Michoacán paradigm (inscribed 2010): ich.unesco.org
• Wikipedia, Pozole (hominy stew; blanco, verde and rojo): en.wikipedia.org
• Wikipedia, Mole (mole poblano; Oaxaca, 'the land of the seven moles'): en.wikipedia.org