Christmas Supermarket Specials Reviewed: 14 Festive Treats Worth Knowing About

Introduction

Supermarkets go all in at Christmas, and every year brings a fresh wave of novelty spreads, spiced teas, boozy cheeses and reinvented mince pies. This roundup covers 14 festive products from Sainsbury’s, M&S, Lidl, Tesco and Waitrose, organised into four categories: breakfast, German market treats, the cheeseboard, and mince pies. For each item you’ll find what it actually tastes like, the price, and whether it earns a spot in your festive shopping list.

Category One: Breakfast

The breakfast round starts with a mystery fruity, spiced tea that turns out to be Sainsbury’s Mince Pie Tea. Despite the name, it doesn’t really taste of mince pie; it’s a black tea base loaded with Christmas aromas, including cinnamon, clove, nutmeg, orange peel, lemon peel, hibiscus, apple and a hint of licorice. At £1.50 a box, or roughly 7.5p a cup, it’s priced like any standard tea, and the flavours are exactly what you expect from the season.

M&S leans into the fun with its Christmas Tree Crumpets, £1.25 for six, paired with a Sherry Trifle Spread at £2.75. The crumpets are straightforward and charming, but the spread is the talking point: an egg and butter based curd with berries and sherry that tastes like the custardy, fruity, sherry-soaked elements of a trifle in spreadable form. Tasters found it very sweet, but several felt it was almost too good to waste on a crumpet, suggesting it would shine on a scone, rippled through ice cream, or layered into a Victoria sponge.

Sainsbury’s also makes Christmas Pudding Whole Grain Wheats, £2.00 a box. These are mini shredded wheat style cereals with a raisin filling plus the spices of Christmas pudding. The verdict here was mixed: the spice hit is mild, and more than one taster felt they were essentially raisin wheats with a Christmas tax attached. Still, with cinnamon and nutmeg in the mix, it’s a low-risk seasonal switch for cereal lovers.

Category Two: German Market Treats

Lidl’s Stollen Bites, £3.49 a packet, were the runaway hit of this round. They taste like a buttery, cakey mini stollen: marzipan, classic cherries and dried fruit, plenty of almond, warming spice, Jamaican rum, and a sugar-dusted finish. Tasters compared them to a squashed croissant dipped in booze, and the consensus was emphatic: spectacular.

Three Mills Gingerbread Mulled Wine costs £4.00 a bottle and sits at a gentle 5.5% ABV. It’s a sweet, berry-forward mulled wine built on white wine, with rich fruit, classic mulled spices and a distinct gingerbread character. The producer, Three Mills, is based in Norfolk and makes the wine from Spanish grape juice, using one of Spain’s most widely planted grape varieties. It’s cheap, cheerful and unmistakably festive.

At just £0.79 a packet, Wernsteiner Lebkuchen Milk Chocolate Coated Biscuits are the bargain of the entire roundup. These soft, chewy spiced biscuits are packed with hidden fruit, including apple extract, figs and apricots, and finished with a milk chocolate coating. Tasters described them as soft like macaroons yet chocolaty like a good biscuit, and the low price made them an instant buy.

Category Three: The Cheeseboard Round

Sainsbury’s offers two fruit-studded Wensleydales at £2.50 each. The Apricot and Amaretto version reads as sweet apricot folded through crumbly curds, while the Cranberry and Orange delivers exactly the flavour its name promises. Wensleydale has a long history as a fruit-friendly cheese, originating in Yorkshire, and both versions divide opinion: pleasant and festive, though not everyone wants sweetness from their cheese.

Lidl’s Christmas Chutney, just £1.00 a jar, is a straightforward fruit chutney built on apple, pear, figs, sultanas and cranberries with festive spices. Apple dominates the ingredient list, which matches the first impression on tasting. It’s a simple, affordable companion for any cheeseboard.

The Wooden Spoons Prosecco Berries, £8.00 a jar, sit firmly in the gift market. Made by a 40-year-old family-run company with a shelf full of Great Taste awards, this is a selection of fruits preserved in a prosecco syrup. The first hit feels alcoholic but settles quickly into something sweet and fruity. It works beautifully over ice cream, on a pavlova, or as a cheeseboard and hamper addition.

Category Four: Mince Pies

Tesco Finest Spiced Rum Lattice Mince Pies, £2.00 for six, lean into the spiced rum trend with generous, buttery, crisp pastry and a posh lattice top. The rum presence is noticeable but identifying specific spirits in baked goods is genuinely difficult; what matters is that they taste rich, well spiced and classically good.

Heston from Waitrose takes a different angle with its Larger Spiced Mince Pies with Lemon Twist, £2.40 for four. These have a spiced pastry base, mincemeat, and a bright lemon curd element that brings real citrus zing. Tasters agreed they barely register as a traditional mince pie, but as a dessert-style treat they were genuinely enjoyable. They are large, which partly justifies the higher price.

Sainsbury’s Taste the Difference Berry and Gin with Clementine Mince Pies, £2.00 for four, come with a crumble topping. Despite the gin billing, no gin flavour came through, and the overall impression was sweet, spiced and closer to a jam tart. Fine, but the least distinctive of the three.

Buying Advice: What’s Actually Worth Buying

A few clear patterns emerge. The German market category is the strongest all round: at £0.79, the Lebkuchen biscuits are an effortless buy, the stollen bites justify their price, and the gingerbread mulled wine is a fun bottle for the price. In the breakfast round, the crumpets and sherry trifle spread earn their place as a charming gift or family treat, while the Christmas pudding wheats are more novelty than essential.

The cheeseboard round rewards the budget picks: a £1.00 jar of chutney will earn its keep all December, and the Wensleydales are worth trying if your crowd likes fruity cheese. Among the mince pies, the Tesco lattice pies offer the best balance of quality and value, while the Heston pies are worth picking up if you want something genuinely different. And if you enjoy baking, the simplest takeaway is that great homemade mince pies need only shop-bought shortcrust pastry and mincemeat, with a twist of your own added to the filling or the crust.

Conclusion

Fourteen products later, the standouts are the ones that either cost almost nothing and overdeliver, like the Lebkuchen biscuits and Lidl chutney, or bring something genuinely new, like the sherry trifle spread and Heston’s lemon twist pies. Match your purchases to how you actually celebrate, and don’t be afraid to borrow ideas from the products you like and make your own version at home.