Product Review: Hormel Compleats
April 28, 2009 by Sandy Mitchell
Filed under Recipes
Hormel’s latest convenience food advertises that it’s healthy and ready in 90 seconds. Hormel Compleats are desk or pantry to microwave meals that come in 25 varieties including chicken and dumplings, sesame chicken, homestyle beef with potatoes and gravy, and tuna casserole. The choices tend to be comfort-style foods.
These meals are portioned for one (not-so-hungry) person. They say they are “created for a healthy lifestyle” and frankly, some are much more healthy than others. Calories range from 210 to 360 per package. Complete nutritional information is available on the Hormel Web site.
I tried the Sesame Chicken and found it okay, if a little bland. I added chopped peanuts and a little hot sauce and it perked it up a little. I give Hormel points for the convenience of the meals plus for this style of product, they use a minimum of packing–a good thing for the environment.
(photo courtesy of Hormel)
Have you tried the chicken alfredo? Ick! I bought one the other day, but only because Harris Teeter was having triple coupons. At $2.89 each, I won’t be buying more unless they’re a deal.
I disagree with some of this- it’s only “healthy” if you consider getting nearly half of your daily sodium intake from one less-than-satisfying tray of food to be “healthy”. They also do not use “a minimum of packing”- they could easily use a printed film cover and completely eliminate the cardboard wrap (it is a plastic tray with a plastic film cover completely wrapped in a cardboard sleeve).
Today I ate… well, I hesitate to call it “lunch”, because that puts a lot of other food in bad company. Let’s say, “I ate at noon”.
I’m not a huge fan of food that comes with instructions, but the “low fat, 200 calories” bumpf swayed me, & I decided to give it a go.
Firstly: you could tell it was “low fat” because all the taste calories had been removed to make way for the preservatives.
Next: as you can see, the front of the packaging promised me chicken breast, mashed potato & gravy. The contents… well, allow me an analogy. Say there was a curtain with Angelina Jolie printed on it, and when you pulled it aside there was me. Technically, all the advertised elements of the package are there, but they just don’t fit together as expected.
Also: despite draining off half of the liquid-claiming-to-be-gravy, the pureed white-froth-claiming-to-be-mash was still essentially soup. The chicken (actual breast meat, credit for that) had *A* taste but not a chicken-flavoured taste as one might reasonably expect.
Finally: it went down, but the stomach got one sample & went on strike, and has spent the last 4 hours trying vigorously to send it back.
I heartily recommend never EVER subjecting yourself to the awful, unspeakable travesty of “food” that is the Compleats range, produced by Hormel (who I’ve never heard of, which should have been a clue).
To shamelessly paraphrase from Star Trek: It may be sustenance, Jim, but not as we know it.