Marks & Spencer Wild Salmon & Cucumber sandwich

A short wander up the lunch time road led me to the revered Marks and Spencer food halls of Gracechurch Street, where from their surprisingly small selection I selected the 'Wild Salmon & Cucumber' sandwich.

Was it worth the extra few hundred yards walk?

First Impressions

The packaging is a few steps up the design scale when compared to the drab plain beige that Tesco pack their (so far) underwhelming sandwiches in. Indeed, the packaging promises a feast of cucumber inside! Could there really be so much cucumber inside or are they just promising us cucumber nirvana?

The cucumber isn't so obvious when looking at the front of the sandwich, but there seems to be a decent amount of salmon filling on show.



Detailed Inspection

When opening the sandwich, we can see that M&S have made more of an effort with the cucumber than Tesco - there is at least two and a half slices of cucumber in each half of the sandwich! They have also made a good effort at spreading the Salmon filling to the outer reaches of the bread.

However, on the plain piece of bread there is a rather off putting thin white coating, which at first glance I thought was mould. But it is in fact a very thin spreading of butter. It's so thin that I don't know how they could have got it on there - it's like there was some butter on a piece of paper that they have then pressed against the bread, and a small amount has transferred from the paper to the bread. And I've never seen butter so white - I thought it was margarine, but it is listed as butter in the ingredients. So the half with the filling looks promising, but not so much the other.

Taste

Salmon, unless it is smoked, has quite a subtle taste. And here that subtlety is almost lost by being mixed with mayonnaise. Due to the amount of cucumber in the sandwich you get some crunch with almost every bite. The wholemeal bread is fairly soft, and is thankfully free of the bitty bits that you so often get in wholemeal bread.

It's probably best described as being in-offensive. It's not bad, but a lot of the Salmon flavour is lost.

Verdict

For £1.90 it's quite a good value sandwich. I don't think it will ever win any awards (maybe I should come up with some), but I think it's better than the Tesco sandwiches that I have reviewed so far. Marks and Spencer have at least made an effort to get a good amount of filling all the way through the sandwich, so that is worth an extra mark at least. I just think it could have done with a bit less mayo or something else to bring the Salmon flavour out a bit more.

I am going to give it a generous 4/5, mainly because I haven't got a half sandwich graphic.

Tesco Tuna & Cucumber Sandwich

Where would the world be without the good old Tuna Sandwich? Walk into any sandwich shop or supermarket and you'll most likely find some kind of variant of the Tuna sandwich. Usual accompaniments include sweetcorn, tomato or cucumber. So how does the Tesco variant fare?

The Tesco example is one of their cheaper sandwiches at £1.60, and comes with cucumber. Is it a bargain? Let's see...

First impressions

As we open the sandwich box, we can see that the Tuna is visible, so there must be a half decent amount of Tuna in the sandwich. And there are at least a few bits of cucumber. So at first glance it doesn't look too bad for £1.60.

Tesco Tuna & Cucumber sandwich

Detailed Inspection

But what is this? Upon opening the sandwich we see how little our £1.60 is getting us:

Miserably small slices of cucumber

In one half of the sandwich the cucumber doesn't even amount to 2 slices, and the partial slices are arranged right at the front to give the impression that the sandwich contains a decent amount of cucumber. Although not clear from the photo, the amount of Tuna gets thinner towards the back and the top slice of bread has nothing on it at all - no butter or mayo. Just a plain piece of bread.

Having seen the first half of the sandwich you could reasonably expect the rest of the partial cucumber slices to be in the second half of the sandwich - the top slice is missing about half a slice, and bottom slice about three quarters of a slice. But no! The partial cucumber slices in the other half do not make up a whole slice! 

Where have the missing parts of the cucumber slices gone?

Somewhere there is a big pile of cucumber offcuts. Maybe they use them for even smaller portions in other sandwiches. Maybe the factory workers bring a little fun into their daily routines by competing for the 'biggest pile of cucumber offcuts' award. Who knows? One thing's for sure - they are not in the sandwich.

Taste

When finally getting round to eating the sandwich, it's not a totally unpleasant experience. The flavour of the Tuna is OK, mixed as it is with mayo, but it is let down by the filling being far too thin. The cucumber (what there is of it) is crunchy.

But because the filling is too thin, the bread is what you can taste the most of. This would be fine if it was a well made, tasty bread, but a low cost brown sliced loaf will never have the best taste.

It's rather like eating a single slice of bread that has had something spread on it rather than a sandwich.

Cost

So if I was to try and put this sandwich together myself, how much would it cost? Going by the prices on the Tesco website for their online shopping, I've come up with the following:

• 2 slices of bread - 4.5p based on Tesco Stay Fresh Wholemeal Medium Bread @ 50p.
• Tuna - 18p based on one third of Tesco Everyday Value Tuna Chunks @ 55p.
• Cucumber - 2p based on Tesco Whole Cucumber @ 42p
• Mayo - 2p Tesco Everyday Value Mayonnaise @ 40p

I've been generous and assumed they used a third of a tin of Tuna and that you could get 40 slices or so from a whole cucumber. So the grand total comes to 26.5p! And that is using shop prices, not the cost price that a mass producer would receive. I have no idea what their cost is in producing the sandwich, it's packaging and transportation, but it's fair to say based on the ingredients you are not getting great value.

Verdict

The cost of £1.60 seems cheap for a lunchtime sandwich, but it's clear it's not particularly great value - the taste is OK, but some more filling would make it so much more enjoyable. For the cost of £1.60 you could make a far superior version. In fact, I'm struggling to see how you could spend that much - even if you used 2 whole tins of Tuna for an extra thick filling you would still come out way under budget!

I give it 2/5.