Assignment: Buyer Beware Blog

For my Buyer Beware project, my group compared frozen meals to their homemade counterparts. We did this for the average college or university student. Basically, we wanted to know which the average student would prefer, a quick frozen meal that might lack in taste, or a well-prepared homemade meal that can be boasting in flavor!

To conduct our experiment, we began by heading to the grocery store to find the best products for the best prices. So we decided on two dishes, chicken alfredo and vegetarian lasagna. For the lasagna, we decided on purchasing Bassili’s Best 6 Vegetarian Lasagna which cost $11.98. For the chicken alfredo, we bought Stouffer’s Chicken Alfredo which cost $5.99. Now all we needed to do was find a very basic recipe similar to these and buy the ingredients.



All the ingredients for the lasagna cost $24.30 which was, of course, much more than the price for the frozen dish. All the fixings needed to make the chicken alfredo were, to our surprise, very close in price with the frozen meal.

Now, all we needed to do was prepare all the meals for a taste test the taste test we planned to hold in the atrium at school. We did all the cooking at Fresh Café where Jim was connected to the owner. This worked out to be very helpful because it provided us with all the resources we needed to prepare the meals. This whole process was quite enjoyable as none of us in the group had much cooking experience. We divided the tasks between us evenly and managed to complete the lasagna first in approximately an hour and a half. The chicken alfredo process was very similar. We split up all the tasks evenly and completed it in about 45 minutes.

Luckily for us, Jim’s connection to Fresh Café also had catering equipment so she was able to bring all the food to the school and keep it heated. We could not have held this taste test without her and we’re very thankful for her help. We had all the equipment and food set up in the atrium just to right of the elevator which we thought would be alright with the school officials. Turns out it wasn’t. It violated the school’s policy of serving food without charging for it. We did it anyways with the support of our trusty instructor Kenton Larsen. He took all the blame from the authority figures, but luckily for him, he didn’t get in trouble either. So we had all our food set up and we were ready to go. The students started piling in quite fast and our food was being talked about all around the school. Each person who participated in the taste test had to taste one of the frozen dishes, and then taste it’s homemade equivalent, all the while not knowing which was which. Then, they had to fill out a small survey which asked which meal they liked better and they also had to score 1 to 4 on the factors that were their main priority while shopping; taste, price, health, and convenience. We predicted that price would be the clear winner in that survey, but to our surprise, taste came in first getting 53% of the first place votes. Price did however come in second getting 30% of the first place votes. Health and convenience were far behind with 11% and 6%.

When it came to which dishes were actually preferred by students, the homemade vegetarian lasagna beat the frozen with 76% of students preferring it. Then out of nowhere, the frozen chicken alfredo managed to beat out our home-cooked with 53% of the vote. Many of the comments on our chicken alfredo were that it needed a much creamier sauce. This problem couldn’t have really been avoided as we prepared the meal the night before and all the sauce had pretty much vanished. All that remained on the food was the flavor, which we were praised for.

We came to the conclusion that what students prefer depends on each persons individual preference. If they prefer taste, they should cook their own meals. If they watch how much they spend, they would be better off sticking to frozen meals. If health is the number one concern, cooking a meal themselves with ingredients they choose would be best. For all the students with no time on their hands, the convenient choice is frozen dinners as they offer no preparation time and very little attention.

The entire group had fun working on this project even though there was lots of disagreement and confusion. The confusion coming mostly from Alexa…Just kidding. We all had equal parts in the planning, preparations, and presentation. The report was split into sections and each member of the group wrote a section. We all looked over the report to edit it, but Sandy did do the majority of the editing and composing of the final draft.