Worth the extra £££ for some things - definitely not for others! (Tesco Finest Range)

Member Name: gayle04

Product:	Tesco Finest Range
Date:	25/05/09 (66 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Tastes good, looks really luxurious

Disadvantages: Sometimes a bit of a rip off for what you get

Tesco's "finest" range is a range of luxury foods sold under the Tesco brand. Tesco has three different tiers of products - value (the cheapest), just plain "Tesco" (mid-range) and Finest, which is high end products or food made from the best ingredients.

Tesco Finest foods tend to be pretty expensive, if you are buying an Italian ready meal such as Spaghetti Carbonara, you can expect to pay around £3.50 - £4 which is a lot for a small portion. I have actually tried the Tesco Finest Carbonara and it's lovely but I could make my own for a lot less money, especially if I was cooking for a few people.

The packaging of Tesco Finest foods is black and white and silver and usually has some nice images of the product on the front. It looks quite luxurious and you can tell just from looking at it that it is a high end product. They tend to display a lot of the Finest range together in the fridge section and they sell all sorts of different ready meals - Italian, British, Oriental, Indian.

Taste wise, I think that the Finest range is a bit hit and miss. I don't mean that it sometimes tastes bad, I just find that it sometimes isn't noticeably better than the non-finest range. This is particularly true of the lasagne they do, and some of the jars of sauces for pasta and chicken. Some things do taste a lot better, their Finest bread for example is lovely and fluffy whereas their normal range bread tends to be quite thin and not so fluffy. I think you really have to try a few different items from this range to tell which are significantly better (and worth the extra cash), and which ones you can't notice much difference in.

I don't usually buy Finest products because my budget doesn't allow for it but there is one area where I splash out and that is meat. I find that the quality of meat in the Finest range is far superior to others. It is most noticeable in chicken which seems to have so much more flavour, and also their sausages have no gristle in them at all (I HATE gristle). I definitely subscribe to the whole "buy less meat but buy better quality meat" idea as I think it makes a big difference. I would recommend people try Finest meats and taste the difference between that and normal or value meat.

Summary: Great for meats and the odd other food product - but lasagnes etc are much of a much.