A food writer sampled four supermarket bakery cookies — including two from Sainsbury’s, Co-op and Aldi — to see which matched or beat Marks & Spencer’s milk chocolate cookies on taste, texture and value.
Aldi’s in-store bakery cookies won the taste test for flavour and texture while costing just 36p per cookie.
Co-op’s milk chocolate chip cookies offer strong value and good chew at 35p per cookie.
Sainsbury’s ‘Taste the Difference’ cookies felt premium and larger, but were too buttery and dried out faster.
A writer who regularly buys supermarket bakery cookies compared four in-store offerings against her memory of Marks & Spencer's Milk Chocolate Cookies. M&S was described as a four-out-of-five baseline for flavour and texture, but at £3.10 for five (62p each) it felt overpriced. The test judged each cookie on taste, texture and value for money, with all cookies stored and sampled the same way.
Co-op's Milk Chocolate Chip Cookies were praised for having plenty of chocolate and an ideal chewy texture. They were slightly smaller than other samples but offered a buttery, lightly caramelised flavour that hit the sweet-but-not-too-sweet mark. Priced at £1.75 for five (35p each), Co-op was positioned as a very good value alternative to M&S. Sainsbury's Taste the Difference – premium but flawed (2.5/5) Sainsbury's premium bakery cookies were the most expensive in the test and the largest in size. They used Belgian milk chocolate chunks and presented as a buttery, shortbread-like biscuit. For someone who prefers buttery biscuits this will work, but the reviewer found them too buttery and the texture became dry and crumbly after a day in the cupboard. The reviewer didn't feel the premium chocolate improved the cookie experience enough to justify the price. Sainsbury's Milk Chocolate Cookies – cheapest but average (2/5) Sainsbury's standard milk chocolate cookies were the cheapest per cookie at £1.50 for five (30p each). They offered decent chewiness but were light on chocolate and lacked the salt or depth of flavour that made the winning cookie memorable. The reviewer described them as perfectly fine but not distinctive.
If you buy in-store bakery cookies to save time on baking, Aldi's bakery cookie delivers the best combination of flavour, texture and price in this test. Co-op is a solid second for value and chew. Sainsbury's premium option will suit fans of buttery shortbread textures, but it loses appeal if you want a chewy cookie that keeps well. M&S remains a reliable choice in memory for texture and chocolate distribution, but its higher per-cookie price didn't beat the Aldi result in this comparison.
Bottom line: for shoppers looking to buy supermarket bakery cookies instead of baking, Aldi offered the best buy in this test for taste and value.
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