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Muesli musings
mini me + poo

For the past (cough) years, my basic breakfast has been yogurt, fruit and muesli. This means I've tried rather a lot of mueslis.

I've never liked the standard Alpen or its 'let's see how much loose sugar we can add' clones, and the Dorset Cereals range is way too expensive unless there's a serious discount on offer, so my current favourite is the Harvest Morn 'Luxury Fruit & Nut' which is an Aldi own brand product.

You would have thought that would make it simple to get, but one of the things Aldi do to make their stock control easier is bundle more than one product together in the same big box and with the same barcode. In this case, the 'Fruit & Nut' (purple packet) muesli is paired with the 'Fruit' (brown packet) muesli. Which isn't as nice.

It's not just me who thinks so either. Typically, whenever I go into an Aldi, there are about four big boxes of the two. They started life equally split between the Fruit & Nut and the Fruit, but what's left on the shelf is almost always entirely Fruit, sometimes to the point that two boxes-worth of Fruit have been stuffed into one. If I'm lucky, the box underneath and behind the rest has a couple of Fruit & Nuts, so I buy them – you can never be sure when you'll find it again.

The downside of having the same barcode for both is that the Aldi stock control system never realises that there's a big disparity in demand. It was a similar situation with their 'not from concentrate' orange and apple juices, but they did move from 4:4 in a box to five orange and three apple, which seems to reflect real demand – there's never a huge preponderance of one or the other now. Here, it should be at least 6:2…

Two exciting* developments have happened recently. Firstly, the packet size has increased from 750g to 1kg. This means there are now fewer packets in each box, but they stand up better to being rummaged through to find the Fruit & Nut ones. They're so much better at this that I wonder if that was the reason for making the change (I should really have checked to see if the price per 100g changed, but..)

Secondly, the 'best before' dates have got more variation. Before, you could buy two packets many weeks apart and discover that both had the same 'BB' date. There were only about four of them in any year and it would jump from some date in April 2017 to 6th July 2017. Now, I have four packets in the cupboard* and they have four different BB dates, including two with 2nd Aug 2017 and one with 4th Aug 2017.

* Your level of excitement at these may vary, and almost certainly does!

** This translates to about three weeks supply. I have no idea who has a 30g portion – mine's nearer 200g.

Mirrored from my website's blog, The deranged mad of a brain man.


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My portion size of granola is 40-45g. Just data pointing

See also Lidl's Swiss Style Muesli (fake Alpen) vs Swiss Style No Added Sugar, two shades of blue, also packaged together in the same brown cardboard pallet, and the NoAS ones always disappear. So far still 750g - I hope they are dedicating their stock control analysis to the fact that at least 2 of 3 local Lidls have been sold out of Stikeez spaceships for the last 4 days...

For reference my portions must be about 150g, or a bit less if I'm adding fruit.

You may be familiar with the phenomenon of manufacturers retrofitting portion size after they've established how much fat and sugar and salt they are willing to highlight in a 'portion' - leading to examples like the chocolate fudge pudding with 2.5 portions per pack, honest guv.

As with their chocolate, this is one area where Aldi does much better stuff than Lidl!

That's a neat/evil trick.

I don't know - Lidl cereals and especially chocolate are excellent!
Also I have 3 Lidls within walking distance, whereas the nearest Aldi is a 20 minute drive, so doesn't happen.

See also all efforts to get schools, vending machines, hospitals etc to provide 'healthy' food where you have to define what levels of added sugar/saturated fat/salt etc can be in a portion, rapidly followed by providers giving people 'servings' of meals which may well be multiple 'portions'... The only way to get people to eat less is to restrict choice, but that doesn't fly in current climate.

Still no Stikeez spaceships available today. I will have to compose a sternly-worded Tweet.

! at the concentration of Lidls.

If you are ever at an Aldi, the chocolate I like is their Choceur range - the milk chocolate in particular is excellent value for money. I don't know of a Lidl equivalent, and their milk chocolates don't work as well for me. I have tried their 'single country of origin' bars, but they've stopped doing my favourite.

The Bellarom Rich Chocolate is the best milk one - there's one with whole hazelnuts too. The single-origin ones are excellent dark chocolate, but even the basic 39p bars are better than the abomination of Kraft Dairy Milk.

There is an Aldi in Tooting, but as it's opposite a Lidl (not one of my 3 local ones!) I use Lidl just because I've already read all the packaging and know which juice is real and not 'nectar' (ie 50% water plus sweeteners), etc.

Local Lidl is redeemed by having spaceships back in stock yesterday (and last 3 visits they've given me an extra Stikeez, too. So Quatlet will be well up there in playground bragging stakes today!)

Have you considered making your own? Seems like it'd be quite practical, just making up a fresh batch every couple weeks, or whatever frequency makes sense for you - and that way, you'd be able to tweak it each time to be just a bit different, or even exactly the same, if you happen upon a combination that brings you nirvana at breakfast time.

Not that I can speak much on breakfast matters: I don't really tend to bother much with food until the evening; I'll start the day with a good mug of something coffee-based, whether a great single estate from a press, or maybe a quad cappuccino with caramel syrup. =:9

I've done so at a hotel that has a dozen bowls of different stuff, but it's too much faff to do at home.

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