Dollar Tree Canned Meats - A Review

I was recently at a dollar store(Dollar Tree) and crossed through the food isle. Against my better judgment, I thought I'd make it a point to taste test their canned meats.

Call me brave or stupid, but here were my results;

Off brand SPAM - 7 ounces for $1. Bristol Grill. It really wasn't that bad. I tried it plain and it tasted like high fat bologna. Decided I'd fry some in a pan to taste test, results were great. It fried nicely with a hint of charcoaled crisp on the fried side. I ate a few slices and my dog enjoyed the rest. Result: yeah, keeping a few cans in the pantry seems like a good idea.

Canned herring - 4 ounces for $1. A personal favorite of mine, canned herring is a 'treat' for me. The dollar store brand "Pampa" was another story. Soaked in vegetable oil, the calories are high (perhaps a positive) but there is little meat. When I compared the meat content to my local grocers standard brand, there wasn't any value besides higher calories due to higher volumes of vegetable oil. Result: buy from your local grocer, they won't be filing the can with oil.

Canned buffalo shredded chicken - 10 ounces for $1. Harvest Creek. I have to admit, this product worried me more than even the off brand spam. Canned meat for $1.60 per pound must be the devils work, right? But I was throughly impressed. Not only was the flavor great, but the value per ounce was the cheapest of the meats. Result: the price couldn't be better as long as your mind is stronger than your gut. It tastes fine, but who knows where the "shredded" chicken came from.

Some of the other meats I saw but didn't try; oysters, tiny shrimp, mackerel.

So In short, I'll be spending $30 on some canned meats for security. And who knows, I may even pull a few cans out before they expire for a last resort meal.

Add some Ramen and rotel and you have a veritable prison dinner.

a reply to: ghostrager

Excellent, though completely unexpected, review. I make a point of keeping some potted meat on hand for emergency preparedness.

If you like smoked oysters I'm sure theirs are fine. Smoked oysters are so potent I doubt that any faux pas could make a dent in the taste.

originally posted by: ghostrager
I was recently at a dollar store(Dollar Tree) and crossed through the food isle. Against my better judgment, I thought I'd make it a point to taste test their canned meats.

Call me brave or stupid, but here were my results;

Off brand SPAM - 7 ounces for $1. Bristol Grill. It really wasn't that bad. I tried it plain and it tasted like high fat bologna. Decided I'd fry some in a pan to taste test, results were great. It fried nicely with a hint of charcoaled crisp on the fried side. I ate a few slices and my dog enjoyed the rest. Result: yeah, keeping a few cans in the pantry seems like a good idea.

Canned herring - 4 ounces for $1. A personal favorite of mine, canned herring is a 'treat' for me. The dollar store brand "Pampa" was another story. Soaked in vegetable oil, the calories are high (perhaps a positive) but there is little meat. When I compared the meat content to my local grocers standard brand, there wasn't any value besides higher calories due to higher volumes of vegetable oil. Result: buy from your local grocer, they won't be filing the can with oil.

Canned buffalo shredded chicken - 10 ounces for $1. Harvest Creek. I have to admit, this product worried me more than even the off brand spam. Canned meat for $1.60 per pound must be the devils work, right? But I was throughly impressed. Not only was the flavor great, but the value per ounce was the cheapest of the meats. Result: the price couldn't be better as long as your mind is stronger than your gut. It tastes fine, but who knows where the "shredded" chicken came from.

Some of the other meats I saw but didn't try; oysters, tiny shrimp, mackerel.

So In short, I'll be spending $30 on some canned meats for security. And who knows, I may even pull a few cans out before they expire for a last resort meal.

Good to know.

The Snack Pak Pudding 4-pack tastes decent and offers nutritional value. The generic canned peas and corn taste decent but any of the generic canned veggies with green beans, carrots or potatoes in them have a very unusual and nasty flavor, very unlike the typical store brands. The Hanover clam chowder and other generic soups are watery hells. The spaghettios and ravioli are littered with high fructose corn syrup.

The crackers, cookies, chips and dip, sodas and juices, peanut butter and jellies are terrible. They taste like flavored chemicals no one has made any effort to hide. All are high fructose corn syrup minus the chips/dip that just have this cardboard like chemical taste to them.

The dried rice, beans and tortillas are good. So is the oatmeal. All the noodle products and bread are wheat. No rice noodles or anything gluten free.

All the shampoo and body wash products are terrible. For men, women and kids. Watery with hardly any scent to them and you can smell the plastic from the container in the pathetically measly suds it generates.

The quality is overall terrible. The terrible economy forces grocery purchases there. Most stores are located right next to a WalMart. The poor rub shoulders with the middle class who shop there to buy their paper and plastic products like paper plates, sandwich bags, and birthday party - holiday supplies, candy and greeting cards, which all of those are of a normal quality comparable to Walmart but cheaper.

a reply to: ghostrager

The tiny shrimp are useful for ice fishing bait. Arctic Char love shrimp through the hard water... same with their canned kernel corn.

I'll pass on eating any of that crap myself (though I do have a sick infatuation with Spam, so I may try that). Oh, and canned herrings and mackerel make useful chum... jab holes in the cans, toss a few into a cheesecloth sack with some rocks, and tie a rope to it, lowering the mess into the water. Lot of bottom feeder fish will respond positively to that.

a reply to: ghostrager

If you're trying to save money the absolute cheapest food is rice, but that information won't help you as rice starts to taste like rubber after a few days if that's all you eat, almost any food does. What never gets old is whole milk, you can drink it all day long for months. But you need to take a multivitamin so you don't get a deficiency. I survived on milk for 3 months once, a gallon a day. Get some chocolate syrup too for chocolate milk.

I found the Herring to be quite good.
Considering..

I tried the cheaper products and didn't care for them too much. I stock and rotate a dozen cans of spam. It is good with eggs in the morning with toast. I usually buy it on sale and it is around two bucks.

I buy canned chicken and use it once in a while mixed with miracle whip, we keep at least five miracle whips in stock also, buying them for around two bucks a bottle with a coupon just before holidays. Before Christmas, Easter, the fourth of July, and Labor day weekend they seem to go on sale.

Buying tuna on sale and rotating is good also. I like the IGA brand best when it is on sale, for sixty cents it has more tuna and better tasting tuna than many of the other brands out there in it's class. We stock around twenty cans of that. I also buy canned salmon when it goes on sale cheap. I like the smaller cans for about a buck fifty. Make sure to get the wild Alaska type. The cats love the juice and a quarter of the can goes to the cats when I open one.

We Buy a lot of things on sale and save a bundle on our grocery bill. We try not to put things in rotation that we don't really like now, we learned that rotating is much nicer if we buy things we really like and buying them on sale saves.

Our whole inventory of food is actually free already since we saved so much saving not only on the cost but also saved trips to the store because we were out of something. That always leads to impulse buying. We make eighty percent of our bread and also we cook from scratch at least seventy five percent of our meals. I consider making spaghetti with canned Baroni sauce and fresh hamburger in it with Creamettes spaghetti sort of scratch even though it is not all home made. We still buy our noodles in bags also but have a hand cranked noodle machine from a rummage sale that works great. I do make homemade noodles sometimes, they are so much better and also cheaper but I do get lazy most times with that.

My wife does make some homemade spaghetti sauce too, then we freeze it. It saves quite a bit too.

We have found that organic ketchup tastes better and so does organic pizza sauce so we now buy that most times. But we buy it on sale every time and it saves about forty percent.

Prepping actually is really fun, especially when you can save money doing it. The couple of hundred we innitially spent has been paid back two fold in savings. The sense of security you get is also worth a lot. Knowing you can take card of the ones you care for is nice.

We can't stock more than three months supply for all my family, that would be a year for me and the wife. We can't rotate it properly if we get any bigger than that. Usually we have about a hundred pounds of flour in stock, that only lasts about a year without getting stale. So that is about four months of bread making ingredients in stock.

Now Everything is paid back and we are actually always saving money. I can't understand why more people don't prep a little. Most people only have a week or less food in the house, that is not enough. A month is probably enough for most people in the city, they will take care of people in the city before us out in the woods. We are supposed to know better here out in the woods, the government takes a while to get to us and big suppliers send stuff to the cities before us if things go wrong. We are Yoopers, we are supposed to be prepared. We could get six feet of snow in one storm here and be stranded for weeks with no power..

I love dollar stores! Some carry name brand foods and name brand household items too. They also have great gift ideas for children. They carry so many items and I save a fortune going there!

Nothing wrong with the Dollar store food . I have tried some and found it not bad. However , I mostly go for the snacks

here in the UK - we have " poundshops " which are roughly comparable - but i avoid them - as the product quality varies so drasticly

however aldi and lidl stores - are cheap - and quality - sometimes working out what some stuff is is half the fun - they stock lots of european brands that sometimes dont have english product labels

a reply to: ignorant_ape

I shop Aldi here in the US and they are great. They sell a huge tin of Ravioli for US $1.69 that will feed me and my lady friend well with a few spice and cheese extras. If we both can have a main course for a dollar or less I consider that a very good deal.

a reply to: Mr Headshot

Don't forget the mayo! Ahh, you should see the pizza crust made from ramen. Vomitable.

and the oysters/clams really aren't that bad, they have some mineral grit still there, though I have only eat them once anywhere and I don't know if that is normal or not.

Hmmm Im peculiar with food, also the exp dates need to last. I love smoked oysters but the can , the smoke flavoring and the oil is highly carcinogenic. I would buy hunting rifles.

a reply to: ghostrager

Watch for the Swift Premium PREM product, 12 oz can. They have those sometimes (I usually buy them out when they do).

That and the 2 Lbs of Browns dried pinto beans are the best bargains in the store.

Sometimes they have the 5 pound bags of flour as well, those fit perfect in a one gallon mylar

we were in our local dollar store and I saw two corn on the cob vac packed, has anyone else seen it or has been brave enough to try it?

I do get the Holiday brand of spam (i like it fried for breakfast with eggs)
the smoked mussels and oysters aren't bad I find them a little heavier on the oil than brand name ones but the taste is the same
the squid in a can is just NASTY, that's all I'm gonna say on that one

a reply to: ghostrager

I love this thread.

I'm in sick today so I've decided to inventory my canned "meats". I'm runnin' low, I gotta go shopping.

For the record: I like Spam very much, it's way up there, but my thing has been a lifelong obsession with this stuff:

originally posted by: Night Star
I love dollar stores! Some carry name brand foods and name brand household items too. They also have great gift ideas for children. They carry so many items and I save a fortune going there!

I love their cheese balls.

Family owned business here in the states.

Forgot to mention they are Christians and each bag has a short "scripture".

We just got the paper and decided to go to the two day sale at Super one. Chicken leg quarters were twenty nine cents a pound. Two ninety for a ten pound bag. The brand is decent. They are froze so I had to take them apart and made two vaccumed packed bags with two in one and three in the other. The rest is in the soup pot with some carrots, celery, cabbage, onions and garlic, and salt and pepper along with some homegrown dried sage and a little tabasco sauce. I make a lot of soup in the winter, it is great for colds.

We also bought six cans of tomato paste at twenty nine cents as well as a couple of cans of cream of muchroom soup and six Frenches taco seasonings at the same price. If you are going to prepare, you need to make the disaster food some of the best you can get. If your preoccupied cooking you won't be stressed by all of the stuff going on. It will pass you by without you not even realizing the internet is shut off. You need to avoid the ATS withdrawal syndrome.

It seems that society wants us to spend a lot of money creating overspiced foods. A roast cooked with salt and pepper and a little garlic salt tastes great. But if your tastebuds are hijacked nothing but highly spiced and sugary foods that stimulate opiate production in the brain will satisfy you. If we keep taxing these systems, when you get hurt the chemicals that relieve pain are used up. If you keep drinking alcohols and sometimes sugars if you have lots of the wrong bacteria in the gut, the senovial fluid in the joints gets overly used. You feel great till it is all gone then the joint starts to wear out and it starts to need some medical treatment.

Don't overdo the buzz that overconsumption of a certain food chemistry can give you. If you keep stimulating endorphins, you always need endorphins just to feel normal. Your life becomes boring when not stimulating them. this leads to more bad swings in mood and you become impatient. You can handle it when you are young sometimes, but when you get older it tends to start effecting you most times.

Enjoying life only three hours a day is boring, you should be enjoying your life all the time. We only have one life to live, we have to make the best of what we got. Now if you go shopping, buying things creates endorphins. It is alright as long as you do not overshop and wind up broke all the time. Inventing a good bread recipe that everyone likes keeps you happy as you save money. All we need is something to do, companionship, food, and warmth. When I was young and working at a gas station pumping gas with hardly any bills to pay, I was really happy. I was getting peanuts for wages.

Our lack of patience can make our life miserable, we keep buying things or spending everything we have to be happy. We only need a few good friends and we do not have to go to a fancy restaurant to be happy. We can cook simple meals at home and invite our friends over to eat. It has to be a shared event, going to each others place or getting together to do these things. It does not have to cost more to have a BBQ or go out for a picnic. We do not need to buy expensive cuts of meat to impress our friends. Having hotdogs and beans and potato salad is fine.

So now I suppose the government will be checking up on me because I say you do not need to spend lots of money to be happy. You do not need to be in debt surrounded by more than you need to be happy. Raising the goal post does not need to be done. You get stuck working all your life sometimes at a job you do not like if you spend too much.

a reply to: ghostrager

Not Sure its worth surviving for spam. but you can get some pretty cheap cans of goya black beans with olive oil and piementos that last for 5 years and they are pretty darn good over rice or by itself. Also a good source of protein and fiber.

www.whfoods.com...

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