Milk chocolate in name only (Tesco Value Chocolate in general)

Member Name: Chelle1969

Product:	Tesco Value Chocolate in general
Date:	19/06/09 (72 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Err...well it's cheap

Disadvantages: It tastes cheap

Tesco Value Milk Chocolate

Like most people I love chocolate. Well, I love Cadburys chocolate to be precise and generally stick to only buying Cadbury's when I need a fix of the chunky brown stuff. So what on earth possessed me to buy a bar of Tesco Value Milk Chocolate I'm still not sure? But buy it I did, and I now feel compelled to pass on my findings to you, so that you don't make the same mistake.

Packaging
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The bar comes in a printed foil wrapper with the Tesco Value logo in one corner and the words 'Milk Chocolate' emblazoned across a blue band over a photo of the chocolate. The front also features the nutritional info for ¼ of a pack (25g); 130 calories, 12.7g sugar, 7.9g fat, 3.9g saturates and salt trace.
Yes that's right, a ¼ pack of this chocolate will consume 14% of your GDA of sugar and a whopping 20% of your saturates. Don't worry about this too much though as it's unlikely that you'll manage to eat that much of it!

The back of the wrapper has more information:
A further breakdown of the nutritional properties
Allergy advice (contains milk and soya, no nuts but not guaranteed nut free, suitable for vegetarians)
Storage advice (keep cool, dry, away from bright light and strong odours)
Ingredients (sugar, cocoa butter, dried whole milk, cocoa mass, milk sugar, whey powder, vegetable fat and emulsifiers).
A summary states that the chocolate contains a minimum of 27% cocoa solids and 14% milk solids

The Chocolate
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Once opened you can immediately smell that something is not quite right, the smell is what can only be described as that of cheap chocolate. For me it brought back memories of the chocolate in advent calendars when I was young, I remember waiting all month to get to the little square with the little chocolate behind it, only to be bitterly disappointed (every year) at the fake taste.
The Value bar looks okay; it's a nice milk chocolate colour and is divided into five 'logs' each with a dividing break point to create 10 large chunks in total. The texture is fairly soft it breaks easily and is quite smooth on your tongue at first. However, as it melts in your mouth a disturbing gritty crunch becomes apparent which I can only assume is sugar. Which would explain why the chocolate tastes so very sweet. It really is the overriding flavour; a sickly sweetness that lingers long after the chocolate has gone.

One chunk of this was quite enough for me; I did go back later and try one more chunk just to be sure but it was no better the second time round and the rest of the bar went into the dustbin. So not such great value after all.

I said earlier that I wasn't sure what made me buy this poor excuse for a bar of chocolate but actually I do know, it was the price - just 27p for a 100g bar - can't be bad I thought. But oh how wrong I was. You'd think it would be obvious that something so cheap is not going to taste as good as an equivalent branded product and of course hindsight is a wonderful gift. In my defence however, I have found that many of the Tesco Value range products are indeed comparable to more expensive brands, and I naively thought (hoped?) that they might have found a miraculous way of producing Cadbury quality at about a third of the cost. No such luck, in this case you get what you pay for!

Summary: Don't compromise on quality, leave this on the shelf