Below are the results of our panettone taste test 2018: Tesco Finest Orange Liqueur & Chocolate Panettone (750g) £10.00. Voted our winner! This soft and springy Panettone was a massive hit with our testers who all said one slice was not enough. Instantly on opening you could smell a nutty chocolate – think Nutella with a hint of orange.
Aldi is the nation’s favourite supermarket for 2018, according to exclusive Which? research. The budget retailer has knocked Waitrose from the top spot, which it held for three years.
Sainsbury’s finished in last position, with the least-satisfied in-store customers overall. Asda, Morrisons and Tesco, the other three largest supermarkets, complete the bottom half of the rankings. The results come as rumours circulate that Tesco may be planning to launch a new rival to discount stores – scroll down to find out more.
Meanwhile, premium supermarket M&S was rated second best by in-store shoppers, with Lidl taking third place.
Which? surveyed 6,800 members of the general public in October 2017 about their experience of shopping for groceries in large supermarkets, convenience stores and online.
Read on to find out how retailers stack up against each other, or head to our guide to supermarkets compared for more details.
In-store supermarket rankings
Nine major supermarkets are included in our in-store rankings. Customers rated their experience of shopping with them in the past six months, on aspects including range of products, quality of both fresh and own-label products, store appearance, queuing time and value for money.
To calculate customer scores, we asked people how happy they were with their supermarket, and whether they would recommend it to a friend.
The table below shows how supermarkets compare for in-store customers. We asked online shoppers slightly different questions – scroll down for the online results.
The best supermarkets
Aldi’s value for money and top-quality products make it the UK’s favourite supermarket. Only it and third-placed Lidl scored five stars for value for money, according to their customers. Both discounters were also rated well for the quality of both their fresh and own-label products.
However, Aldi and Lidl both also scored just two or three stars – equivalent to a ‘poor’ or ‘OK’ rating from their customers – for staff availability, queuing time, range of products and store appearance.
Waitrose and M&S, in contrast, scored four or five stars on those aspects. Although it ranked fourth overall, Waitrose got five-star ratings in the most categories. It was the only store that customers gave five stars for staff availability – but it also got the lowest rating for value for money.
When it comes to satisfaction, customers seem to be prioritising price over in-store experience.
Price also seems to be driving popularity; Aldi and Lidl now account for nearly £1 in every £8 spent in Britain’s supermarkets. A decade ago, this was £1 in every £25.
The worst supermarkets
Sainsbury’s came last for shopping in-store, although it didn’t score poorly in any particular area. Customers are left feeling uninspired, according to our survey, with one shopper telling us it was ‘slightly dull-looking, but reliable’.
This is also true of the other ‘big four’ supermarkets – Asda, Morrisons and Tesco. All get three or more stars in every category we asked customers about, but they sit together at the bottom of the table, meaning customers don’t feel particularly satisfied with them.
Tesco was the only one of the four to get a five-star rating – for its range of products. According to reports from The Sunday Times on 11 February, Tesco is alleged to be planning a new stand-alone discount brand to take on Lidl and Aldi.
The newspaper speculates that Tesco is working on a ‘secret plan for a new discount grocery chain’ to take on the growing German discounters Lidl and Aldi. It ‘would match [Lidl and Aldi] on price, and offer a far more limited range of products.’ When asked for comment, Tesco told Which? it would not comment on rumours and speculation.
If the rumours are true, it could completely shake up our ranking of the UK’s supermarket brands in years to come. Watch this space.
How does online shopping compare?
Our survey also asked customers to rate their experience of online supermarket shopping – and the results are quite different. Iceland ranked mid-table for in-store shopping, but finished joint-top (along with online-only Ocado) for online grocery shoppers.
It’s the second time in a row that Iceland has topped our online table. Customers love its friendly delivery drivers and delivery slots that are convenient and available.
Joint-top Ocado’s customers also praise its friendly drivers and convenient slots, plus the quality of fresh products and its range.
Amazon Fresh, the other online-only brand in our survey, is rated well – but not brilliantly – by its customers. Shoppers like its drivers’ service but didn’t rate it well for punctuality. Only seven in ten customers said that their most recent delivery arrived on time. Amazon Fresh only delivers to certain postcodes in the south-east of England at present.
Asda sits at the bottom of the table, where it has been for more than a decade. Customers are unimpressed by the quality of its fresh and own-label products, and the items it chooses as substitutes when the things you’ve ordered are out of stock.
As with in-store, Sainsbury’s and Tesco also finished near the bottom of the table. Morrisons does better, in joint-third place. Customers gave its drivers rave reviews, although it was worst for the punctuality of its deliveries.
Get the best out of your supermarket shopping
In a year dominated by rising food costs, we crunch the numbers every month to find out which supermarket is cheapest for a basket of groceries.
Our exclusive analysis includes all the items you need, from bread to toothpaste, and includes brands such as Andrex, Heinz, Lurpak and Warburtons. Find out which supermarket was cheapest in 2017 in our supermarket price comparison.
Plus, we keep an eye on the prices of products we’ve rated Best Buys from supermarkets. See our Best Buy supermarket offers to find out if you can bag a bargain on the best.
Updated 12/02/2018 to include details of Tesco’s rumoured plans to launch a new brand to rival Aldi and Lidl.
It’s beginning to look a lot like — Valentine’s Day? Barely a month after launching his virtual luxury bakery From Roy with two Christmas panettones — one scented with candied orange and raisins, the other a less traditional chocolate-streaked loaf — the pastry chef Roy Shvartzapel has unveiled a third in honor of the holiday at his workshop in Los Gatos, Calif. The news is cause for celebration among Shvartzapel’s discerning devotees — many of the country’s most respected chefs among them. His domed wonders are unworldly in their featherweight texture: the tender crumb dissolves on your tongue, almost like cotton candy, were cotton candy spun from butter. They seem paradoxically rich and ethereal at the same time.
How does he do it? Maniacally. He’s been training for it like an Olympian. When he graduated from the Culinary Institute of America Hyde Park nearly 12 years ago, Shvartzapel “had three names on my dart board.” He vowed he would work for Ferran Adrià of El Bulli, France’s pastry mastermind Pierre Hermé and the American great Thomas Keller of the French Laundry. “I would get laughed at when I told fellow students that’s what I was going to do,” he recalls, chuckling.
The chef hit his targets — all three of them. It was during his time with Hermé in Paris that he first watched the Italian specialty being prepared for the holidays. Up until then, the Israeli-born, Texas-raised cook says his “only reference point for panettone were those spongy, gross things” — the weighty, mass-produced, everlasting hulks most of us here in the States are accustomed to regifting. As he observed the meticulous, all-hands-on-deck effort, Shvartzapel realized it was “a really time-consuming product” that brought everyone involved “a lot of anxiety.” And with that, he added a fourth name to his dart board: Iginio Massari, who, from his humbly appointed Pasticceria Veneto in Brescia, a small town outside of Milan, is considered the master of panettone.
In 2006, without speaking a word of Italian, the American pastry cook managed to charm his way into Massari’s kitchen; the maestro covered his apprentice’s room and board and taught him the secrets of — and diligence required to create — a legit panettone. “I got to watch him every morning starting at four a.m.,” the onetime disciple relays, “It was the most surreal thing. It’s process with a history that’s just incredible. And then the product when treated this way is just magical. So I became completely obsessed with it.”
Back in the U.S.A., he eventually landed the job of pastry chef at Cyrus restaurant in Healdsburg, where he started making panettone by himself. But it wasn’t until opening his own bakery, Houston’s Common Bond, in 2014 that he got serious about producing the sweet bread for commercial purposes and first received attention for it. After splitting from his partners there, he returned to the Bay Area, where, with the help of the branding team Base Design, he conceived of — and, in December, introduced — From Roy.
He attributes the panettone’s remarkably delicate sponginess to its high level of fermentation, which is all due to his natural yeast starter. “It’s not made with commercial yeast,” Shvartzapel says. “You can take the same formula with commercial yeast, you have brioche with some fruit. You can’t call it panettone.” As if developing and maintaining that live yeast entity weren’t enough of a challenge, there’s the task of the making the bread itself. “In terms of the rules of baking, it breaks every rule you think you know. It shouldn’t work! It shouldn’t rise properly or develop the volume it has. It shouldn’t be happening. No other bread works this way.”
Maybe that’s why no one produces it commercially on a large scale here, Shvartzapel figures — and because, according to him, millions are sold globally per annum, he’s throwing down. He’s not just lobbying to make panettone big in America, he’s promoting it as “a year-round SKU.” He has a precedent. “There was a time, a few years ago, where you said ‘pie’ and people only associated it with the holidays.” Now, he points out, there are pies for every occasion. His newest offering combines raspberry, chocolate and pistachio. Chocolate-dipped strawberries are “generic and cheesy,” he explains. But switch up the berries, combine them with the nuts — a wonderful match for red fruit — and bake them into a souffled, golden-crowned confection, and “that’s how you win Valentine’s Day.” It may also be how you make someone fall in love with panettone.