Atomic Shrimp - Tuppenny Sausages - Page 1

Tuppenny Sausages - Page 1 - About The Sausages

Sausages For Two Pence Each

June 2008 - A new supermarket price war has been declared, The weapons in this war are... sausages

One of the major UK supermarket chains - Asda - announced their intention to start selling sausages for two pence each.

Two English Pennies for a sausage.

At least one other supermarket - Tesco -jumped hastily on the bandwagon, matching the offer.

Obviously, this sparked a bit of attention from the media, food critics and writers, gourmands, food enthusiasts and assorted other interested parties. Would the sausages be fit for human consumption? Would they contain any meat at all? Was this a sign of the apocalypse?

Find Out Here

I'm sure I'm not the first to write about this, but I decided to investigate. I bought, examined, cooked and ate a pack of these famously cheap sausages - and I'm going to tell you all about it.

Advertise your site on Atomic Shrimp - Right here in this slot!

The Famous 2p Sausages

Here they are - this pack of eight bangers cost me 16 pence.

The first - and probably most important - thing to note, is that these are not sausages that have been specially manufactured to be sold at 16 pence a pack - they are in fact just Tesco's own 'value' brand sausages - that have always been available in this form and recipe.

So what we're seeing here is not a sausage phenomenon - it's merely a promotional one.

Examining The Pack

Before we get to the sausages themselves, let's take a good, close look at the information provided on the pack...

The Front label

454g of sausages - 56g per sausage (I tested this and the declared weight was true), or 28g of sausage per penny.

There's an at-a-glance nutrition information panel on there - pointing out that two of these sausages contributes one-third of your RDA of salt, and one-fifth of your RDA of saturated fat

Livestock Standards

The front label also informs us that the pork in the sausages is produced according to Tesco's livestock standards - which, on its own, means nothing much at all (its not as if they would sell them something that fell short of their standards - that's what standards are for - isn't it?)

Tesco's policies on livestock can be perused here - they seem fairly reasonable, although I'm sure animal welfare campaigners would probably pick them up on lack of quantitative data. Take a look and make up your own mind...

The Ingredients And Nutrition Panels

Crikey, that's a lot of text. Let's try to summarise the composition:

40% Pork, supplemented with a stabilised mix of water, fat and wheat starch, protein and flour, plus some other stuff for flavouring and preservation, plus rusks.

That's not a particularly large amount of meat (around 60% is typical for standard bangers - 'butcher' sausages typically contain more still), but at the same time, it's not astonishingly low either - I've seen other brands - even those not specifically marketed as low budget foods - with a smaller percentage.

Nutrition

This is where I got a bit confused - because I can't make the figures add up. The chart below is taken from the stated breakdown per 100g of raw product:

-The stated nutritional components add up to 46.2% of the sausage - we know there's less than 40% water, because the ingredients have to be stated in descending order of quantity. So there's at least 14% - probably more - of the sausage that isn't fat, protein, carbohydrate, fibre, or water, despite it having to be from one or more of the declared ingredients.

If anyone reading this can suggest a plausible identity for the missing matter, please let me know...

Anyway, I guess that's enough waffle - on the next page, we'll take our first look at the sausages themselves.