I'm Cheap!! (Sainsbury's Basics Digestive Biscuits)

Member Name: CPTDANIELS

Product:	Sainsbury's Basics Digestive Biscuits
Date:	23/01/09 (400 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Taste great at less than the branded biscuit price

Disadvantages: Packaging

Background:

I have been buying these biscuits for the past six months. They were indeed the first product from the Sainsburys Basic range that I tried and I have been purchasing them ever since.

Price:

Immediately I am impressed, a packet at my local store cost me just 31p for a 400-gram packet. This compares very favourably with the admittedly larger 500n gram branded products currently costing 84p.
This seems fine on paper but it is a false economy if the product is either tasteless or unpleasant when you eat them.

Packaging:

All the products in the Sainsburys Basics range are in a distinctive white and orange packaging, which is clear and unfussy in appearance. The packet does not look anywhere near as attractive as the branded ones.

The packet provides a lot of information to the buyer. The first I notice is the fact that this product is suitable for vegetarians, and then I see the Sainsbury's pie chart or traffic light telling me what each biscuit contains (details listed below). On the chart green is low, orange is medium and red is high, probably not surprisingly for a biscuit this was is high in fat and saturated fat, nothing is green.

The packaging also lists all the nutrition advice plus importantly the Allergy advice. This advises that it contains milk and wheat gluten, which because of the way it is manufactured that it, is not suitable for nut and Soya allergy sufferers.

The product:

I found the packet easy to open following the advice on the item. However I encountered a problem when I paced the biscuits on a plate. Three of the biscuits were broken out of the 32 in the packet. That's 9.375% and this is typical from my experiences over the past few months. That said they are still edible it just creates a mess with crumbs everywhere.

Appearance:

The biscuit is slightly smaller than the branded ones by approximately 2cm in diameter by seem of similar depth. Despite this they look similar and have a good effective design on each one that looks very similar to the branded ones.

Smell:

They smelt to me of wheat but not much else, certainly not unpleasant.

Taste:

I bit into the biscuit and was immediately impressed the biscuit was nice and firm and did not crumble either in my hand or my mouth. The biscuit was crunchy, with a distinctive wheaty taste, maybe a little dry in taste but very similar in overall taste to the branded ones. It was a pleasant and even pleasurable experience, even though I did find the biscuit did stick in my teeth. They were very morish and they did not crumble straight away in my mouth they required a certain amount of chewing.

Although I'm not a cook, these biscuits would I believe be ideal in some cake receipes, because of there quality.

Dunking test:

Whenever I have a biscuit I always like to dunk them in my tea or coffee, so I had to try them for this. My experiment was very successful the biscuit on no occasion dropped in the drink and tasted very nice coated in coffee. Plus an expected bonus for me, because their diameter is not as large as the branded ones I did not have to bite o break the biscuit to dunk it, it could go straight in the drink! A bonus to me!!

Would I recommend these?

Yes is my simple answer. The product tasted to me exactly the same as the higher costing branded ones and the only noticeable difference is they are slightly smaller in size than the others. Indeed I would feel more than comfortable offering this product to my friends and family when they visit. The only thing I would do is put them in the biscuit tin, so they did not see the packaging.

Conclusion:
A very good cheaper alternative to the branded product. I would without hesitation recommend these and I will continue to purchase them in my weekly shop because there is no difference in their taste and they are a fraction of the cost.
Well with a try!!

Each biscuit provides:

Fat: 2.8g
Sat Fat: 1.3g
Salt: 0.2g
Total Sugars: 2.7g
Calories: 60


Thank you for reading mt review.

@CPTDANIELS January 2009

Summary: Great tasting inexpensive biscuit