Are all mince pies created equal?

We bought, analysed and ate mince pies from Checkers, Food Lover’s Market, Pick n Pay, Spar and Woolworths. 

This is what we found.

The cheapest mince pies were from Checkers

What’s in your mince pie?

Mince pies are shortbread pastries with spiced-fruit filling sold in the months leading up to Christmas. 

Woolworths and Pick n Pay use butter in their crust. Spar and Checkers use margarine. Food Lovers uses lipolyzed cream (dairy products where fat has been eliminated, but the flavour remains).

Spar’s mince pies’ packaging had a nutrition facts label. The other stores’ mince pie packaging didn’t.

Woolworths told The Outlier that they did not supply this information for mince pies. While, Pick n Pay’s spokesperson said “Products made specifically for seasonal celebrations like Easter and Christmas do not carry nutritional information as they are only on [the] shelf for a few months and the product recipes change every year.”

We reached out to Food Lovers and Checkers for their nutritional lists, but had not received them at the time of publishing.

How much of the packaging can you recycle?

Mince pies have several components to their packaging: aluminum cups, the plastic tray, the plastic sleeve and often a cardboard sleeve.

You can recycle most of the mince pie’s packaging except for the plastic tray.

We spoke to Woolworths about why you couldn’t recycle the plastic tray, and they said at the time of production, you couldn’t recycle PET [Polyethylene terephthalate] plastic trays, cups and punnets like the ones used for mince pies.

“All lightweight PET plastic packaging will in future carry the RECYCLE communication,” a Woolworths spokesperson told us. “However at the time of going to print we were not sure of the commissioning date of the ZIBO recycling plant and therefore we had to communicate NOT RECYCLED.”

“The waste pickers now know that PET lightweight packaging is being recycled, it is being collected and transported to Cape Town for recycling at the Blackheath plant.”

How do you know what you can recycle?

Most retailers will tell you on their package recycling label with the words “recycle” or “not recycled”. Not recycled,  according to the Woolworths’ press office, means “the packaging is not being collected and recycled in South Africa.”

For more tips on recycling, check out Treevolution’s recycling guide and newsletter.

What did our team think about the mince pies?

The six-person Outlier team – after analysing the packaging, nutritional information and cost of the mince pies – did get to try them in the office.

We did a blind test where only one of us knew the brand of the mince pies; while the rest of the team had to pick their favourite. 

Some retailers recommended warming up the mince pies before eating them, but we didn’t do that. 

Mince pie E (from Spar) had more pastry than filling – leaving one of our team members feeling cheated. While some found it very sweet. 

Then mince pie D (Pick n Pay) was super fruity with its raisins. 

Another fruity-sweet mince pie was C (Food Lovers). 

Mince pie B (Woolworths) had no alcohol in it, but the selection of spices (clove, cinnamon and nutmeg) with the lemon zest and orange and lemon peels gave it a slightly boozy and somewhat nostalgic taste. 

The last mince pie – and winner for our team – was mince pie (A) from Checkers. It had a fruitcake-esque centre (apple, sultanas, raisins, candied fruit peel, cinnamon and cloves) and a perfect amount of pastry and filling.

As one of our team said, “I would actually buy it.”

The winning mince pie was also the cheapest with the third highest number of preservatives and ingredients listed in its filling.