Campaign For Real Salad: Supermarkets vs Fast Food Restaurants

You all know about the Campaign for Real Salad and my petition by now. I’m trying to take supermarkets to task for making their prepackaged salads unecessarily calorific and fat heavy. Thanks to the interesting comments put on my previous post, I decided to have a little looksy at how the supermarkets shape up to the fast food restaurants. Surely when you’re grabbing lunch on the go, their salads will be a healthier choice than heading to McD’s, KFC or Pizza Hut?

To give the fast foodies a fair crack of the whip, I’ve chosen their grilled meat options, not the deep fried ones. Both options are available.

McDonalds
Grilled Chicken and Bacon Salad (with a choice of Caesar or Balsamic Dressing)

No idea if the nutritional values include the dressing or not. The ingredient list suggests that it doesn’t. Points off McDonalds for another example of confusing labelling.

KFC
Grilled BBQ Rancher Salad

Again I call misleading labelling – I think this information does not include dressing once more and I could not find any information about the nutrition of any of the ‘choice of dressing’ you have available to make a ‘delicious salad’

Burger King
Grilled Chicken Salad

Again offered on its own or with a choice of two dressings, but once again not a snifter of information about the nutritional information for the dressings. Starting to see a recurring theme here.

Pizza Hut
All you can eat salad bar

Pizza Hut offer unlimited salad with any main, but you can also buy it on its own for £5.55. On their website they just give us calorie information – 160kcals. Looking at the list of items available I think you’d be hard pressed to keep it down to that amount – pasta salad and potato salad are not going to help, before you even get to the bacon bits and crispy onions!

However, I can’t help but notice they do offer a Low Fat French Dressing – round of applause! And after digging around their website a little more, there is full nutritional information available for the entire salad station – both the fresh salad vegetables and the dressed salad items. Consider my mouth agape! And, for your enjoyment, here it is – a fast food restaurant giving full, honest nutritional information about their salad dressing.

So, while we might all struggle with the ‘all you can eat’ element of Pizza Hut’s salad bar, at least you can be properly informed about making decent choices for a healthier meal. Very impressed. How is the salad bar at Pizza Hut, anyone got a review?

The closest comparison I could find in the supermarkets was the Asda Chicken and Bacon salad pot. To be fair, having looked at the fast food websites, the supermarkets now seem positively transparent in their product labelling as everything is given in its entirety, with the dressing included in the total. (But don’t forget, they’ve got a long way to go to create easily understandable nutritional labelling)

So the whole comparison is generally impossible at this stage. But at least you have a bit more information about the salads that are out there and the fact that everyone is giving you too much dressing, that is too fatty and too calorific. Buyer beware.