Choosing packaged saladsCompare salads

Which? has looked at how many calories and how much fat, saturated fat and salt were in a selection of prepackaged salads we bought from Asda, Boots, Marks & Spencer, Morrisons, Sainsbury’s, Tesco and Waitrose.

Many were surprisingly high in calories and fat. One had nearly as much fat as six Cadbury's Creme Eggs.

Healthy choices

Sainsbury’s Rainbow Salad £2.20 (215g)

Calories 300 fat 14.8g sat fat 1.3g salt 0.6g

This colourful salad contains lots of vegetables and has soya beans and lentils, which are low in fat and are a great vegetable protein. The dressing is on the side, so you can add as much or as little as you want. It has the least salt of the salads we looked at: 10% of what an adult should eat in a day.

Sainsbury’s Thai Chicken Noodle £2.95 (260g)

Calories 379 fat 6g sat fat 0.8g salt 0.8g

Grated carrot and spring onions are the only vegetables in this salad, but it is low in fat, salt and sat fat (just 4% of the sat fat that a woman should eat in a day). The nutrition values we show include dressing. As with the Rainbow Salad, the dressing is in a separate container.

Less healthy options

Smedleys Atlantic Prawn Marie Rose Salad £1.49 (300g)

Calories 855 fat 66.3g sat fat 5.4g salt 2g

This salad, which was on sale at Morrisons, contains 855 calories and 66.3g fat. This is more calories and fat than a McDonald’s Big Mac and medium fries. It has 70% of the fat that a man should eat in a day. The only vegetables it contains are a small amount of spinach and cucumber.

Asda Chicken Caesar Pasta Salad £2 (297g)

Calories 683 fat 41.3g sat fat 8.9g salt 1.4g

The 41.3g of fat in this salad is as much as six Cadbury’s Creme eggs. It has almost 60% of the fat and 45% of the saturated fat a woman should eat in a day. A quarter of the salad is calorific and fatty creamy dressings. It contains as much mayonnaise as it does chicken.

Creamy sauces

The reason why many of the salads were surprisingly high in calories and fat was mainly because they had mayonnaise or creamy sauces.

The ingredient lists showed these were often added generously. Asda’s Chicken Caesar pasta salad had as much mayonnaise as it does chicken (13%). Caesar dressing makes up another 10%.

Some salads were low in two of the three nutrients. The M&S King Prawn Salad was low in fat and sat fat, had the dressing on the side and contained lots of vegetables. However, it had 2g of salt, a third of what an adult should eat at most in a day.