12 Festive Supermarket Buys Tested: Crisps, Drinks, Mains and Sweet Treats

Introduction

Every year supermarkets pack more festivity into their ranges than seems strictly necessary, and every year a handful of those products turn out to be genuinely worth buying. We put twelve seasonal buys through a blind taste test across four categories: crisps, festive drinks, main course alternatives and sweet treats. Here is how each one performed, what it costs, and whether it earns a place on your Christmas table.

The Crisps: Festive Flavours Face Off

Three crisp flavours went head to head, and the results were not what most people expect from the packaging.

Sally Taylor Turkey and Stuffing Crisps won the category outright. Made in Scotland from Lady Rosetta potatoes, these crisps deliver all the savoury, herby notes you associate with a roast dinner, yet the flavour is completely vegetarian and vegan. At £1 a bag, they took the category’s seal of approval.

Waitrose Iberico Ham and Fig Crisps confused tasters at first, with several guessing a bacon flavour. That makes sense once you learn the bag contains actual cooked Iberico ham powder, paired with a fig chutney sweetness. At £1.33 they are the priciest of the three.

Lidl Lobster Cocktail Crisps taste genuinely good, with a tangy salt-and-vinegar style acidity and a hint of shellfish character thanks to real crustacean in the recipe, but the flavour is more suggestion than replication. At 79p a bag they are the cheapest of the trio.

The Festive Drinks: Liqueurs, Porter and Fizz

The drinks category produced one clear crowd-pleaser and two affordable, cheerful alternatives.

M&S Clementine Gin Liqueur Snow Globe is the standout, and not just as a gimmick. The clementine flavour is bright and unmistakably Christmas stocking territory, and the bottle doubles as a snow globe: tip it, watch the gold flakes swirl, and press the button on the base to light it up. At £20 it costs about as much as a decent bottle of gin, but this one glows, and the festive angle genuinely adds to it rather than feeling like novelty for novelty’s sake. It took the drinks seal of approval.

Sainsbury’s Christmas Porter surprised everyone at just £1.80. Tasters picked up instant chocolate notes from the chocolate malt, with Christmas spices layered through. It is very London in spirit too, given porter’s origins in the Shoreditch area. Some found it hard to drink more than a small glass, but at this price that is hardly a complaint.

M&S Let It Sloe Fizz lands at £5 a bottle and around 4% alcohol. It blends sloe with strawberry, blackcurrant, blackberry and elderberry over white wine, then carbonates it. The consensus was somewhere between a fancy fruit cider and a very sweet, easygoing festive glass, best served well chilled over ice.

The Mains: Turkey Alternatives

Not everyone wants turkey, and this year’s trend is clearly about combining three things in one centrepiece.

Lidl Three Game Bird is the most ambitious of the three at £9.99. Duck breast, goose breast and guinea fowl breast are rolled together with a pork, apricot and apple stuffing, wrapped in smoked streaky bacon and finished with a blood orange glaze. Tasters detected the citrus and the stuffing immediately, and the convenience factor is real: it goes straight from freezer to centre table. As a concept, the tasters rated it their pick for replacing turkey, though some would rather build a version at home.

Iceland Three Fish Gratin follows the same rule of threes at £7, layering smoked haddock, cod and salmon under a white wine and cheddar sauce flavoured with parsley, lovage, mace and nutmeg, with parsnip in the mix. The taster verdict: the sauce and breadcrumb topping are genuinely great, and the unusual herb and spice pairings with fish are worth stealing for your own cooking, though the two stronger fish compete a little.

Asda Giant Pig in Blanket asks a fair question: if pigs in blankets are the best part of the meal, why limit them to a side? At £5 for ten servings of prime cuts of British pork, it is built to be sliced and served a few rounds per person. Tasters found the sausage tasty and the bacon-to-sausage ratio leaner than usual, better as part of a loaded plate than as the star. It is also straightforward to replicate at home with good sausage meat, where you control the quality.

The Sweet Treats: Popcorn, Chocolate and Turkish Delight

The final category split opinions, with one clear winner and a strong runner-up for gifting.

Popcorn Shed Christmas Pudding Popcorn took the sweets seal of approval at £2.99 a box. Made by cousins Sam and Laura from a literal shed since 2016, it delivers the fruit, alcohol notes and warm spices of a Christmas pudding, plus a mince pie impression so convincing it fooled the tasters’ own instincts. One tip worth repeating: tell your guests what it is before they eat it. It is right up there with leading gourmet popcorn brands.

Love Cocoa Gingerbread Chocolate is a 71% dark chocolate bar at £3.20, which tasters pegged almost exactly by taste. The gingerbread character shows up mainly in the little textured pieces, while the base chocolate is fruity and pleasant, though some questioned whether it beats a good plain 70 to 75% supermarket bar. The ethics story is a genuine differentiator: founder James Cadbury, John Cadbury’s great-great-great-grandson, runs the company with the founding ethos in mind, and every bar sold plants a tree, with over half a million trees planted last year.

Waitrose Pomegranate Turkish Delight with Pistachio swaps the traditional rose water for an intense pomegranate flavour with pistachio nuts inside, presented in a gift box at £6. Even self-declared Turkish delight sceptics came around, praising the punchy fruit layering. It leans firmly into the gifting market, and at Christmas a little extra budget for something special is part of the point.

Buying Advice: What Actually Deserves a Spot

Across the twelve, a few patterns stand out. The best performers tend to be the ones where the festive idea serves the product rather than decorating it: the vegan turkey and stuffing crisps genuinely evoke the roast dinner, the snow globe liqueur is both drinkable and delightfully giftable, and the Christmas pudding popcorn captures the dessert in snack form. The mains alternatives are all affordable frozen options with solid quality assurance behind their sourcing, but for the game bird and the giant pig in blanket, capable home cooks can match the concept themselves. If you are gifting, the Waitrose Turkish delight and Love Cocoa chocolate are the natural picks; if you are stocking the snack bowl, start with the Sally Taylor crisps.

Conclusion

Festive supermarket ranges are a mixed bag by nature, but this year’s batch produced several genuine winners at friendly prices, from a £1 bag of crisps to a glowing £20 liqueur. The recurring lesson from the tasting is simple: the products that earn their place are the ones whose festive flavours are built in honestly, not bolted on. Tell your guests what they are eating, and most of these will disappear fast.