Soft drinks are something that can be consumed quite quickly, whilst being quite expensive, especially if you insist on buying good, well known brands such as Coca Cola and Schweppes. Fortunately, with value brand drinks from supermarkets popping up all over the place, it is easy nowadays to save some money on soft drinks. Obviously, there is an element of truth to the fact that most things are expensive for a reason, and I was well aware that with value products, you are hardly going to get such good quality goods. However, if you balance the quality and the price to the right measure, you may be able to get a superb deal... it really depends on what you decide to buy.

I do love a nice tall glass of lemonade with heaps of ice added in on a hot summer's day, but buying brands like 7Up and Schweppes is not really, in all honesty, the most economically friendly solution. On special promotions, the large 2 litre bottles can drop their price down to around £1, but normally they cost quite a bit more than that. The smaller bottles and cans If drinking soft drinks was going to become a regular habit of mine, I couldn't exactly stick to the good, well known brands all the time.

I decided to give the Tesco Sparkling Diet Lemonade a try. It was a product I saw whilst browsing in the soft drinks section of Tesco- at only 60p for one of the large, 2 litre bottles that can last for ages, I decided that even if it was a bad product, I would not be wasting that much money. Price wise, it is not too impressively cheap for a value shop's own brand lemonade, but for lemonade in general, I find it to be a rather good price. They are doing a 4 for £2 offer at Tesco at the moment, saving you the grand sum of 40p.

The packaging is simple, with a plastic sticker around the simple plastic bottle (which can be recycled) but it is a good thing that Tesco are not wasting too much on packaging for such a simple product. It has all the necessary information on the packaging, but not much else. The cap is easy to screw on and off, and this helps to retain the freshness.

I am not aware about whether this is available in smaller bottle sizes or not; I have not seen any other sizes around the store yet. It's not a big problem; manufacturing smaller bottles would mean spending more money. If you really want it to be portable, you can pour some inside portable water bottles, which is pretty much quite a straightforward concept.

Flavourwise..? Well, obviously, diet lemonades are not that full out on flavour as regular lemonade, but I expected to at least be able to taste the lemon a bit. But, unfortunately, this Tesco Sparkling Diet Lemonade does not allow us too much of that pleasure. I would describe it as more of a tonic sparkling water than a lemonade with perhaps a dash (but not much at all) of sugar or sweetener added in. The lemon taste is hard to find. It is not very nice tasting; no refreshing flavour at all, and nowhere near as lemony enough to be called a lemonade.

On top of this, the lemonade tends to go flat very quickly after you first open the cap, so after that it may even fail to serve as a decent sparkling tonic water.

The only use I have for this and may consider buying this as sparkling water for mixing with drinks. For example, you can make some lovely fizzy squash with this, which can replace some more expensive soft drinks. However, this is rather too expensive for just a sparkling water, which you could obtain for a matter of a few pence from supermarkets' value brands.

Maybe this product is OK for a sparkling water, but not much else. It may be quite cheap for a lemonade, but I would hardly call it a lemonade at that, and I am sure there are cheaper value lemonades out there which can provide you with a nicer product.