SWITCHING branded products for supermarket own-brand versions is a great way to save money on your weekly shop.
But it is often impossible to tell from the packaging whether an own-brand product lives up to the brand.
To save you from guessing, we’ve tried products from all the major supermarkets to find out which ones are the best quality and value for money.
This time, we tested how supermarket own-brand six-packs of ready salted crisps sold compare with classic brand Walkers.
We tasted all the crisps and gave them marks out of ten for crunchiness and taste, as well as taking into account how healthy they were based on levels of salt and saturated fat.
Then we gave them a separate score out of ten for value money.
Here’s how the crisps scored out of 20 overall:
The classic ready salted crisp had a good crispy, crunchy texture and were pleasantly salty.
Compared to the other crisps we tested, they also looked the most perfect – they were uniformly pale coloured with no bits of potato skin on, but this made them feel more processed.
They also contained the most salt of all the products we tasted.
And at 33p per pack, these were more than twice as expensive as the cheapest crisps we tried.
Tesco’s version had the lowest salt levels of all the crisps we tasted and they did taste slightly plainer, with less of a salty taste and more potato flavour – but this made them feel more natural.
The crisps were crunchy but had crumbled into small pieces inside the packet.
Overall, these were not bad at all considering they were half the price of Walkers.
The Asda crisps were very crispy but tasted plain and lacked flavour.
At less than half the price of Walkers, they were a bargain – but you might notice the difference on taste.
These Sainsbury’s crisps were some of the thickest we tried and had a decent crunch.
They were tasty without being too salty – and contained less salt than the Walkers version.
Although the most expensive supermarket brand we tried, at 20p per bag, these were still much cheaper than the brand and nearly as good.
The Morrisons’ crisps were thin, oily and tasted so salty it made me wince – which was surprising as the actual salt content shown on the packet was lower than Walkers.
But it seemed like the balance of salt and fat was wrong with these crisps.
Although they were nearly half the price of Walkers, these weren’t a great alternative.
Aldi’s crisps were crunchy but were bland and lacking a salty taste.
They also had an oily aftertaste and left a greasy feeling in the mouth.
Although these were the joint cheapest crisps we tried, they wouldn’t be a great swap if you love the taste and texture of Walkers.
Lidl’s crisps were the cheapest we tried (along with Aldi’s), at just 11p per bag.
But they were thin, oily and cheap-tasting compared to Walkers.
They also had a higher saturated fat content than the branded crisps.
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