A Little Christmas Nonsense:
Sarsen Technology Mince Pie Tasting 2023

Posted December 18, 2023

Written by Laura K

The Best Supermarket Mince Pies of 2023 Revealed (according to Sarsen Technology)!

One of the numerous Christmas traditions at Sarsen Technology is our annual supermarket mince pie tasting competition.

Since 'Yule Log-Gate' we don't bake our own goods anymore... 
 

What is a Mince Pie?

For our international friends who may not be familiar with mince pies, they are a festive individual pastry pie made with a spiced, fruity filling, and are an integral part of traditional Christmas fayre in the UK.

The Mince Pie Tasting Competition

In the wider interest of discovering the best mince pie offerings from the core supermarkets, the Sarsen team take it in turns to bring in packs of supermarket made mince pies and proceed to scoff them (with highly refined critical palates).

As discerning festive consumers, we take our mince pies very seriously and some of us are quite hard to please! Keep scrolling to see the results...

 

 

Supermarket	Remarks	Score	Ranking
Sainsbury’s Taste the Difference Mince Pies with All Butter Pastry	These topped the charts for us. Good pastry and filling ratio with delicious mincemeat and excellent value for money. The brandy was definitely strong, and some found the mincemeat too boozy. Overall good value and very good pastry.	127/150	1st
Co-op’s Irresistible Luxury Mince Pies	Winner of the famous ‘Which? Report’, we also deemed these to be very tasty! With a buttery crust and generous filling they went down very well with a nice cup of tea. Pretty good value for a luxury taste – a solid runner up!	113/150	2nd
Waitrose All Butter Mince Pies	Another strong contender, scoring highly in the ‘appearance’ category and overall taste, although the mincemeat filling was scored down for being slightly too sweet.	111/150	3rd
Waitrose Crumble Topped Mince Pies	While we all raved about the delicious, spiced orange flavoured filling, these were critiqued for their less than traditional crust, with texture more like a tart or flan, and a topping that lent more towards shortbread than festive crumble.	100/150	4th
Mr Kipling Deep Filled Mince Pies	We all had high hopes for the offering from dessert specialist ‘Mr Kipling’, however we were disappointed to find that the filling was quite mean- more ‘air pie’ than mince pie. This meant that despite the relatively low cost they were marked down for ‘value for money’, with further criticism describing the mincemeat as ‘somewhat jammy’.	91/150	5th