So, picture the scene;  you’ve been up since 6am, you’ve suffered the dreary commute into work, you’ve slaved away all morning without stop, and you’re looking forward to sitting down for five minutes peace with a nice bite to eat.  You’ve brought along a HEINZ beef in peppercorn sauce ready-meal, and it sounds delicious.  A nice hot meal cures all evils, doesn’t it? You’ll wolf it down, have a nice cup of tea, and be fighting-fit for the afternoon session.

You pick up your ready-meal, ready to go in the microwave, and look at the front:

mmmmmm, yes I most certainly will enjoy!  Lovely!

Imagine your disappointment, then, when you find that your piping hot meal is rather less than as described? “Beef in Peppercorn Sauce”, it said. “…with potatoes and a mix of sweetcorn and peppers”.  So, in my mind, I am expecting the following:

Beef in the majority, then slightly less Peppercorn Sauce, then slightly less potatoes, and then finally sweetcorn and peppers in the minority.  

Is this an unfair expectation? A presumption? I think not! That’s how I rationalise their description in my mind, and I’m sure it’s how you do it too.  But you sit down with their meal and find that actually, you’ve just eaten a potato & vegetable dinner with peppercorn sauce.  Was there even any beef at all? If there was, it was lost in the melee of potato and vegetables!

This, is what my Grandfather would have called, a “swizz“.  And there’s nothing quite like a lunch-time swizz to darken your mood for the rest of the day; a plight to which I’m sure most people can relate.  Ever opened up a packet of crisps only to find 7 crisps inside and the majority of the packet a wide open space? That’s what we’re talking about here.  A swizz!

So, let’s get to the bottom of this then shall we? Exactly how much beef is in a “Beef in Peppercorn Sauce” ready meal from HEINZ? I happened to have another of these meals in the freezer at home so I decided to find out.  Here’s what I did:

First, let’s take a look at the opened meal:

It looks rather delicious I’m sure you’ll agree.  But suspicious as well! Where is all the beef? I think I can just about see one lonely piece sticking out at the bottom right corner there.  But that’s it.  No more beef to be seen anywhere.  Well… perhaps all the beef is on the bottom?

Alright then, so let’s microwave it and separate everything out:

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Potatoes

So, here’s the separated out potatoes.  That’s quite a lot!

Since most of them were on the top I managed to separate them out quite cleanly.  There were a couple at the bottom that have a little bit of sauce on them, but small enough to be negligible.   I weighed this little lot in at 125 grams.

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Sweetcorn & Peppers

Next up we have the sweetcorn & peppers.  These were very easy to separate as they were in a completely separated compartment of their own.  This little lot weighed in at 100 grams.

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Peppercorn Sauce

Separating the peppercorn sauce was a little bit more tricky, mainly because of the beef – we’ll get onto that in just a moment.  The Peppercorn sauce consists of the creamy sauce itself, a couple of mushroom slices, and some other bits and pieces that I wasn’t able to make out, but which were certainly not beef.  I did a pretty good job of separating the sauce from the rest of the meal, and I got the vast majority of it out.  This lot weighed in at 135 grams.

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The Beef!

Finally, we get onto the beef! The beef was the most difficult of all to separate, mainly because there was hardly any of it to fish out! After I did get it all out, a lot of it had a significant amount of sauce on it and I felt that this would manifest itself as an unacceptable error in the weight measurement.  So, what to do? Well – quite simple really! We weigh it as it is with all the sauce still on it, then we wash it and weight it again.  All the sauce will have been washed away and we’ll be left with the beef itself.  The second measurement is the amount of actual beef in the ready-meal, and this measurement subtracted from the first gives us the amount of sauce that was washed off, which we can add to the peppercorn sauce total. I already accounted for this in my quoted peppercorn sauce measurement so the 135 grams quoted previously is the total amount of peppercorn sauce in the meal.
How much beef is there? A measly 25 grams!!!

PERCENTAGES

So how does all this work out in terms of percentages? Well, we have:

• 25 grams of beef
• 135 grams of peppercorn sauce
• 125 grams of potatoes
• 100 grams of vegetables (sweetcorn & peppers)

That little lot all told gives us 385 grams worth of meal.  So the percentages, broken down and listed in descending order, are:

So, by my reckoning, the meal should actually be titled:

Creamy Peppercorn Sauce and Potato Chunks.
…with sweetcorn and peppers and small traces of beef.

So thank you for that HEINZ.  I’m fortunate enough that I don’t need to lose any weight, but if I ever do your weight-watcher meals will be just the ticket! Diet by lack of content – fantastic idea!

In closing, I think I should be fair to HEINZ and admit that the meal was actually rather tasty – I enjoyed it! All they need to do is add a lot more beef in it, or otherwise change its title. By the way, I love the “even more” quote underneath the package title! Even more what? More potato? More sauce? More vegetables? Surely not more beef?!