Value for money

Conor Pope reviews fresh fruit salads

P&P Produce Mixed Fruit Salad €4 for 400g  €10 per kg

Highs: Made with two types of melon, strawberries, raspberries, mandarins, grapes, pineapple, blueberries, blackberries and kiwis, this fruit salad, available from farmers' markets across Dublin, has the widest variety of fruits. It's amazingly fresh - as if the fruit was chopped and mixed only hours before going on sale (which it probably was). While the melons, grapes and pineapple are nice and juicy, it's the homegrown - and absolutely enormous - blackberries and raspberries that really stand out.

Lows: It will not be easy for most people to source. Because it is home produced there is no label, so it's impossible to gauge how much of each fruit was used, although there did seem to be an excessive amount of pineapple in the mix.

Verdict: Looks and tastes fantastic.

Star rating: *****

Centra Good to Go Fruit Selection €1.99 for 200g,  €9.95 per kg

Highs: This tastes fresh and is certainly a healthier option than most of the other snacks available from your local Centra. It should prove to be very widely available - day and night - and comes in a handy one-person portion. The accompanying fork, while ridiculously stubby, makes it viable for a wholesome and sticky-finger-free lunchtime picnic. The oranges were nice and juicy and the apples had a pleasingly sharp tang to them. All and all it is much better than you might expect.

Lows: While all the fruit tastes absolutely fine, this doesn't have as broad a range as some of the competition and none of the fruit that is there really stands out. It will feed only one person, so don't buy it with sharing in mind.

Verdict: Very good to go.

Star rating: ****

Nature's Best Fresh Fruit Selection  €4.49 for 480g,  €9.35 per kg

Highs: This is the cheapest of the fruit salads tried, although there is not a huge difference in price between the least and most expensive. It tastes pretty good too. The red and green apples are nice and crunchy and the melon is lovely and juicy while the grapes have a nice sharp tang to them. The packaging says it contains at least six portions of fruit and veg.

Lows: More than half of this fruit salad is made up of apples and oranges which, while fine, isn't all that memorable and might be a little on the cheap side. There were also too many grapes making up the weight in the batch PriceWatch tried and some of them had long passed their salad days. The orange was a bit tired looking and lacked the juiciness and tastiness you might expect.

Verdict: Nice but lacks juice

Star rating: ****

Superquinn Fresh Fruit Salad €6.09 for 600g, €10.15 per kg

Highs: At 600g, this offers considerably more fruit - in terms of weight - than the competition. Chopped into pretty small pieces, it's more suitable for a fruit-salad-based dessert rather than something you'd munch your way through unaccompanied. This was the only one to include the promise of pink grapefruit on the list of ingredients.

Lows: Which made the apparent absence of any pink grapefruit in the actual mix a disappointment. It was much easier to find all the watermelon pips which, while entirely natural, were a bit of a nuisance. Some of the grapes were so very tiny that it might have been more humane for the grape pickers to leave them on the vines rather than ship them off to Superquinn to look inconsequential.

Verdict: Mildly disappointing

Star rating: ***

Marks & Spencer Classic Fruit Salad €4.49 for 400g, €11.22 per kg

Highs: The array of vibrant colours makes this look great and it smells very good too. The melon was nice and fresh and there was lots of it. The individual orange pieces were surprisingly good - nice and tangy and incredibly juicy. The strawberries looked like they'd add a lot to the taste.

Lows: Which made the fact that three of the four strawberries we picked out had turned almost completely to mush - despite the fact that this fruit salad was within four days of its best-by date when eaten. To be fair, the rotten strawberries might well have been a one-off but it still ruined the whole thing. The high price of €4.49 was certainly not a one-off and didn't help matters much.

Verdict: Not exactly rotten but . . .

Star rating: **