The Truth About Your Luxury Ready Meal 2025 1080p HDTV H264-DARKFLiX subtitles – 100+ languages (SRT)

All language subtitles for The.Truth.About.Your.Luxury.Ready.Meal.2025.1080p.HDTV.H264-DARKFLiX

Afrikaans

Akan

Albanian

Amharic

Arabic

Armenian

Azerbaijani

Basque

Belarusian

Bemba

Bengali

Bihari

Bosnian

Breton

Bulgarian

Cambodian

Catalan

Cebuano

Cherokee

Chichewa

Chinese (Simplified)

Chinese (Traditional)

Corsican

Croatian

Czech

Danish

Dutch Download

English

Esperanto

Estonian

Ewe

Faroese

Filipino

Finnish

French

Frisian

Galician

Georgian

German

Greek

Guarani

Gujarati

Haitian Creole

Hausa

Hawaiian

Hebrew

Hindi

Hmong

Hungarian

Icelandic

Igbo

Indonesian

Interlingua

Irish

Italian

Japanese

Javanese

Kannada

Kazakh

Kinyarwanda

Kirundi

Kongo

Korean

Krio (Sierra Leone)

Kurdish

Kurdish (Soranî)

Kyrgyz

Laothian

Latin

Latvian

Lingala

Lithuanian

Lozi

Luganda

Luo

Luxembourgish

Macedonian

Malagasy

Malay

Malayalam

Maltese

Maori

Marathi

Mauritian Creole

Moldavian

Mongolian

Myanmar (Burmese)

Montenegrin

Nepali

Nigerian Pidgin

Northern Sotho

Norwegian

Norwegian (Nynorsk)

Occitan

Oriya

Oromo

Pashto

Persian

Polish

Portuguese (Brazil)

Portuguese (Portugal)

Punjabi

Quechua

Romanian

Romansh

Runyakitara

Russian

Samoan

Scots Gaelic

Serbian

Serbo-Croatian

Sesotho

Setswana

Seychellois Creole

Shona

Sindhi

Sinhalese

Slovak

Slovenian

Somali

Spanish

Spanish (Latin American)

Sundanese

Swahili

Swedish

Tajik

Tamil

Tatar

Telugu

Thai

Tigrinya

Tonga

Tshiluba

Tumbuka

Turkish

Turkmen

Twi

Uighur

Ukrainian

Urdu

Uzbek

Vietnamese

Welsh

Wolof

Xhosa

Yiddish

Yoruba

Zulu

Original subtitles

NARRATOR: Once, ready meals

were cheap, easy and sometimes a bit nasty.

Not any more. Now they've gone gourmet.

So, when it comes to ready meals,

I think that the bar has been raised so much in recent years.

Leading the charge,

popular brands like Charlie Bigham, Cook and M&S...

..all offering us a slice

of a multi-million-pound luxury ready meal market.

The quality can be exactly the same as buying something fresh.

But going posh means a premium price tag.

Luxury ready meals can now cost over £10.

I think they're expensive. I don't think they're great value for money.

A price millions of us are happy to pay.

But what do we get for our money?

In this programme, we unpack Britain's luxury ready meal boom,

exposing the mark-ups... They're costing around the £5 mark.

For pasta and cheese, it seems quite a lot of money.

..health risks...

The thought of consuming that volume of salt in one meal

in one sitting is just crazy.

..the truth about their flavours...

It sort of tastes like packing material.

..and discover if the future is still looking tasty

for the luxury ready meal makers.

From his main kitchen, nestled in the sleepy Somerset countryside,

Charlie Bigham has helped put the luxury ready meal

firmly on our culinary map.

One of the brands at the forefront of leading

chilled ready meal growth has been Charlie Bigham.

He's done a good job at bringing new consumers and new diners

into chilled ready meals.

So the story goes,

after quitting his corporate job in the city

and travelling the world in a yellow camper,

food lover Charlie was so inspired

by the incredible dishes he discovered

that he began to craft a luxury ready meals

at his kitchen table and sold them to local delis.

Charlie Bigham invigorated and excited the ready meal market

after his tour in 1994, with a passion for food,

a real passion for good quality, good tasting food in the house.

Fast-forward 30 years, and his ready meals

are now stocked in all the major supermarkets,

commanding a whopping £6 for a single portion

and almost a tenner for two.

Charlie Bigham has been sold as quite a high-quality product

in the sense that it is often quite wholesome, comforting.

You get this kind of robust feel about them,

and it's very much marketed in the same way.

'Charlie Bigham, You couldn't make him up.'

At a cost of £4 million,

Charlie's latest advertising campaign

portrays a cartoon-style representation of himself

and follows him as he creates one of his luxury meals.

From selecting fresh ingredients at the market

to handcrafting recipes in his tasting kitchen.

Charlie Bigham is one of these entrepreneurs

who has put himself front and centre when it comes to branding.

He's really appealed to those consumers

who don't want to have a faceless, anonymous ready meal.

They want something that feels like it's been cooked

by a knowledgeable chef.

It's not just Charlie who's hit the luxury aisle,

with supermarkets now stacked to the rafters with high-end options.

So, we are less worried about saying that we're using ready meals now.

And partially, that's because ready-made meals

have become better in terms of quality.

And it's not something you need to feel worried about

perhaps giving your children

and telling the world that you are, in fact, using them.

But do they really taste better than the budget equivalents?

Who better to ask than top restaurant critic Jimi Famurewa?

With a palate primed by the world's best restaurants,

he's here to see if he can tell the luxury chilled meal

from the mid-range and budget versions.

So, when it comes to ready meals,

I think that the bar has been raised so much in recent years.

I am really, really hoping

that some of these high-end ready meals

will deliver almost restaurant standard.

First up to test Jimi's taste buds,

three chicken tikka masalas that vary significantly in price.

The budget option comes in at 2.49,

3.95 for the mid-range offering,

and six quid for the luxury Charlie Bigham's.

Will he be able to pick out the high-end meal?

Reputation's on the line, I feel.

First up, dish number one.

The chicken tastes very, very, very low quality.

Yeah.

It's, erm... it's just so lacking in flavour

that it's kind of almost quite funny.

Not a good start,

but hopefully, the next offering will be more promising.

The chicken feels to me like they're quite small pieces,

and maybe there's a bit of dryness to the meat, but...

The sauce itself is actually pretty nice.

It's pretty pleasant.

This is quite a nice chicken tikka masala,

regardless of whether it's a ready meal or not.

Invented by Glaswegian chef Ali Ahmed Aslam in the 1970s,

articles suggest we now buy over 18 million tonnes

of chicken tikka masala a week.

Oh, yeah, that's a tough piece of chicken.

CHUCKLES

Jimi's onto his last chicken tikka.

It sort of tastes like packing material.

I mean, it is having to work quite hard.

With all three plates sampled, will Jimi guessed correctly?

OK, moment of truth. Erm...

More nervous than I thought I would be.

So, this is the second one I tried, which was the one over here,

which I thought was the best.

And now I'm slightly worried.

That is Charlie Bigham's, £6.

Yes. That is the best, at the top end.

Made by marinating chicken in yoghurt and spices,

the Charlie Bigham dish also features rice

prepared with a traditional Indian cooking technique.

So, this envelope contains the one that I think is the better.

Let's see.

Tesco Hearty Food Co, 2.49.

Hard luck, Jimi. That's the budget option.

This is the third one I tried, which I thought was the budget.

Ah! Whoa!

And that is Waitrose. That is 3.95.

So I had the budget and the better the wrong way round.

That is a shocker.

Well done, Jimi.

Though you did manage to mix up the budget and better tier,

I forgive you, as you did manage to pick out the quality

of that luxury ready meal.

But how will you fare

with the nation's favourite pasta dish, the lasagne?

So, this looks so impressive.

There's defined layers. You can see each layer of pasta.

But let's see what it tastes like.

Wow.

Seriously impressive.

Outrageously good, I've got to say.

The modern lasagne dates back to the 14th century,

but its actual origin is contested with the Romans,

the Greeks and even us Brits claiming to have invented it.

It's got that kind of slightly sweet, ketchupy edge.

It sort of tastes like a lasagne that's been...

arrived fresh from the 1980s, to be honest.

A lot of room for improvement.

With the last meal quickly sampled...

The flavour's quite similar to that second one.

It's quite soggy. There's a lot of liquid.

..once again, Jimi has to decide which is the luxury option.

This is the first one that I tried.

Oh, my God. If this is wrong, I might have to resign.

M&S GastroPub, £6.

That is such a good lasagne by any criteria.

The fact that it's a ready meal lasagne is kind of remarkable.

Made from pulled beef and red wine ragu,

the M&S lasagne uses fresh egg pasta

and is topped off with British rarebit. Yum!

The second one, which I thought was the better,

the mid-range of the three, is...

oh, Sainsbury's Stamford Street, 2.49.

But, oh, I'm kicking myself.

The third one I tried, which I thought was the budget,

although I wasn't sure, there wasn't much in it...

..Morrisons, 3.75.

So, I got those last two wrong.

Wow. Wow. Unexpected.

Well done, Jimi.

Despite another mix-up between budget and mid-range,

once again, the luxury ready meal

was head and shoulders above the others,

showing that if you're aiming to eat something

close to restaurant quality,

you've got to be prepared to splash the cash.

Coming up...

Where does your money go when you buy a luxury ready meal?

In the grand scheme of things,

how much is it actually going to cost them?

And a peek inside the ready meal kitchen

putting posh on our plates.

We use real chefs, real knives, real chopping boards.

NARRATOR: Who'd have thought we'd ever shell out £6 for a ready meal?

Yet here we are,

with sales of some luxury ready meals doubling in the last year.

So, what's the pull of these high-end options?

Well, the reason why a lot of people like the more expensive ranges

is because it is a reflection of who they are.

So we tend not to say

if we're buying supermarket's own value range.

We'll probably hide it at the back of the fridge as well,

just to make sure no-one sees it.

But if we buy the posher ones,

they will be at the forefront of the fridge

so when we do open the fridge door,

people can see they're actually in there.

But going high-end means a premium price.

So, what is the potential mark-up on a luxury ready meal?

To find out, we've gone to wonderful Wigan

to meet savvy shopper and mum of two Samantha.

High-end ready meals are not usually the ones that I tend to go for,

just because they're not usually in my price range.

Samantha wants to find out if luxury ready meals

are worth the high price tag.

Can she make a mac and cheese that tastes as good

as the chilled premium options but doesn't cost a packet?

Macaroni and cheese in our family is absolutely one of our staples,

but actually, when you look at some of these higher end ready meals,

for the mac and cheese, they're costing around the £5 mark,

which to me, for pasta and cheese, seems quite a lot of money.

She's not wrong.

A Sainsbury's high-end option will set you back 4.25,

the M&S mac and cheese will cost a fiver,

while the Charlie Bigham meal comes in at £6.

Samantha's using a popular recipe from the web for her mac and cheese.

But to create the ultimate gourmet experience,

she needs top-class ingredients.

So where better to go

than Britain's favourite posh food retailer, M&S?

So, we're going to go to Marks & Spencer's

because I'm thinking I want to try and recreate

that high-end kind of recipe.

And I always associate Marks & Spencer's

with being quite posh, quite high-end.

And if I can get the ingredients from there,

hopefully, we can make something quite similar.

After a quick whizz around the shops,

Samantha has enough ingredients to feed an army.

OK, so, I'm back. I've got everything that I needed.

Let's just have a little look at how much I spent today.

So, it came to a grand total of £12 and 70p.

Now, of course, I'm only serving it for myself today,

so we're gonna break down the cost of all these items

and see how much it would cost for one individual portion.

Using some scales and a little bit of maths,

Samantha's mac and cheese

comes in at roughly £1.50 per portion.

At this price, will it be able to compete on taste

with its gourmet cousins?

So, obviously, the high-end ready meals have got extra things in them.

They've got extra spices, they've got extra herbs,

things that are going to push that price point up.

But in the grand scheme of things,

how much is it actually going to cost them

when they only need a tiny little bit for each portion?

It's not gonna cost them an awful lot.

Even without some of the fancy herbs and spices,

Samantha's recipe can give us an insight

to the mark-up on a luxury ready meal.

So, our mac and cheese is in the oven.

We've worked out the cost, and for a single portion

of our mac and cheese, it comes to around about £1.15.

Marks & Spencer's is where we've got the ingredients from,

so of course we've got to compare their mac and cheese.

Now, this individual portion came in at £5.

This is a mark-up of over 300% just for a simple mac and cheese.

Next, the cheapest high-end option,

but still with a hefty premium, is from Sainsbury's.

So, this is the Sainsbury's Taste The Difference.

It costs £4.25 for this one-person portion.

This comes in at a mark-up of just over 250%.

Finally, the Charlie Bigham mac and cheese,

the most expensive of the three.

Now we're gonna have a look

at something like the Charlie Bigham mac and cheese,

which is this one, one portion.

It's around £6.

Now that means it's got a massive mark-up of just over 400%.

Wow, 400%. That's hard on the wallet.

So, what do we get for our money?

Well, there's no standard size for a gourmet meal,

so as well as having huge mark-ups compared to our homemade version,

they also vary in portion size.

The M&S mac and cheese serving for one is 400g.

The Sainsbury's portion is a smaller 375g,

and incredibly, the Charlie Bigham's,

which costs more than either of them,

is also the smallest at 340g.

So it pays to check the weight

when you're looking at those luxury ready meals.

Look, we all know that ready meals are more expensive

than making our meal at home, but it comes down to time.

Time to shop. Time to prep. Time to cook. Time to wash up.

And actually, the ability to even put the meal together.

And the ready meal does all of that for you.

And on many occasions, it's just worth paying that small premium

for the convenience.

OK, so, they're ready, and let's have a see.

So, after a bit of time in the oven, the luxury ready meals are done.

And don't they look lovely? That's really nice.

So, at their lofty price points,

do they taste better than homemade?

After trying all four, the verdict's in.

If I was to compare and decide, you know, which one I prefer the best,

ultimately, I have to say I prefer the Marks & Spencer's one.

It's just got a little bit more pizzazz to it,

a bit something more special to it.

If... In terms of cost, obviously, the homemade one is the best one.

And actually, I would say this is my second favourite of the ones

that we've tried today.

So, it's a win for Marks & Spencer's on flavour and convenience,

but with our homemade budget option coming in second,

is that enough to convert savvy Samantha to the high-end?

If I could afford to buy the posh ones all the time,

of course, you know, it would definitely go into my arsenal.

As a treat, as a bit of a takeaway night

or a bit of a, you know... a special occasion.

They do taste really, really nice. Absolutely delicious.

Are they, you know, hundreds of percent

better than the homemade ones?

Probably not. But as a treat, absolutely worth the splurge.

While high-end chilled ready meals are filling up our fridges,

the frozen gourmet ready meal market has also taken off

thanks to one innovative company, Cook,

who, unlike most other ready meal makers,

don't rely on supermarkets to sell their products,

instead selling direct to their customers

via 105 freezer-filled boutique shops.

What Cook has done is relatively rare in the UK market.

You don't see that many stand-alone brands

who have struck out and set up their own shops on the high street,

offering their own products, but that's exactly what Cook has done.

For the past 27 years,

the company have been serving up their high-end frozen ready meals

from their kitchens in Kent.

Cook have done a phenomenal job of inventing,

I think reinventing, frozen ready meals.

Frozen ready meals were the first ready meals from the '70s,

but Cook jumped in and took it on to another level.

And what Cook have done is try really hard

to replicate the dine-out experience but in a frozen format.

From a mac and cheese at 4.95

to a crab and fennel linguine at 6.25,

Cook's top-tier pricing promises a handmade experience.

Robin Mcintosh has been cooking with the company for 20 years.

We are in the preparation kitchen.

Notice we say "kitchen". We don't like the word "factory".

We are a kitchen.

We use real chefs, real knives, real chopping boards.

With as much of the cooking process done by hand as possible,

the company produces almost 50 meals a minute.

You need that human interaction.

You need the human eyes, the human senses to make sure

every single ingredient is perfect quality.

If it isn't, it doesn't get used.

Once prepared, the ingredients are moved to the kitchen,

where traditional cooking techniques

have been scaled up to an industrial level.

So, here we are, our main kitchen,

the engine room where our chefs take these beautiful ingredients,

put them together and create our fantastic batches.

As you can see over here, we cook in what's called a bratt pan.

This is basically a giant saucepan which is heated underneath by steam.

Keeps that home-cooked feel, keeps that quality.

We've got mashed potato being cooked here.

Used in a whole range of dishes,

the company goes through a whopping 200 bags of spuds a day.

So, the way we make our mashed potato

is exactly as you would in your kitchen at home.

Boil them in water gently.

Never boil mashed potato rapidly.

And then mash them with salt and pepper and butter,

as you would for a cottage pie in your own kitchen at home.

During the cooking process, food is continually tasted and tweaked.

As you would in your own kitchen,

the chefs are constantly looking for quality.

They're tasting, they're smelling, you know.

Checking good quality of food is about your senses.

If it's not up to scratch, it won't go out.

Founded in 1997 by travelling salesman Ed and chef Dale,

from just a small shop in Farnham,

today, Cook produces around 250 different recipes.

The really interesting thing that Cook has done

is to take the concept of the frozen ready meal

and expand it into a whole cornucopia of ready meal options,

and it very much puts an emphasis on the dishes being high quality,

wholesome and fairly nutritious meals

that we would all want to have at home.

We believe frozen food is better than chilled.

There's less waste. The customer can keep the food for longer.

And what we've worked out here is,

frozen food doesn't need to be a stigma any more.

The quality can be exactly the same as buying something fresh.

Frozen food has certainly moved on

from the fish finger and crispy pancake,

though opinions about its quality and healthiness

still seem stuck in the ice age.

I think there is a misconception that frozen foods,

frozen ready meals, are going to be worse for our health.

They're gonna have worse ingredients than the fresh ready meals.

Actually, the data doesn't hold out to support that.

If anything, the frozen ones might be marginally better for our health

because you're preserving some of the helpful chemicals.

The company relies on a combination of over nine different freezers

to drop food temperatures to a chilly -18 degrees.

These are our blast freezers.

What these will do is rapidly freeze our food

so that when the customer gets it and reheats it from frozen,

it's at the exact same quality it was when we produced it.

Freezing is nature's way of preserving food naturally.

That's what the freezing process does for us.

Once frozen, the ready meals are packed, ready for dispatch.

But before anything can leave site, it must pass quality control.

We taste every dish, every single day.

Everything we make through production kitchen,

we'll taste through our taste panel.

That way, we know the customer is gonna get the exact same experience

every time they purchase our meals.

Today, it's chicken, ham and leek pie,

baked camembert and beef Wellington.

Yep. That meat's perfect.

Yeah, that's spot-on.

Cool. Let's get these released, then. Yep.

With the thumbs-up given, the meals will be sent all over the country,

from Edinburgh to as far as Guernsey,

all tasting as fresh as the day they were made.

Coming up... What doesn't make the luxury grade?

No longer a fried egg, more like a frazzled egg.

And the downside of going high-end.

This is one person consuming this amount of salt in one single meal.

Gosh.

NARRATOR: In Britain, we treat ourselves

to millions of luxury ready meals a year.

But their origins are a lot less glamorous.

If you had to name a moment when the ready meal starts,

you'd probably go to the 1950s in the United States

and a company called Swanson's.

And the story goes that after Thanksgiving,

they had a glut of turkeys,

and they harnessed the technology of airline dinners,

aluminium trays, to produce some turkey dinners.

Turkey, sweet potatoes and vegetables -

package them up, freeze them, and sell them for 99 cents.

Using trays shaped like a television,

they were marketed as TV dinners and were a huge success,

selling 10 million meals in the first year.

However, the UK's obsession with high-end ready meals

took off in the 1970s,

when Marks & Spencer introduced us Brits

to a culinary luxury called the chicken Kiev.

When it was launched, the chicken Kiev at Marks & Spencer

was a runaway success

that they had to keep doubling the amount of production

that they were doing.

So, they were selling out week on week.

So, we know that it was immediately touched a kind of nerve with people,

and people loved it.

Designed to be cooked at home

at a cost of almost £9 per Kiev in today's money,

the dish was both classy and pricey.

Years later, chicken is still a staple in our luxury ready meals,

while some other ingredients barely appear.

Nitisha Patel has been designing and creating ready meals for 12 years.

So, whilst our appetites are growing in the UK

and we are hungry for new flavours,

not everything can become a ready meal, sadly.

And that's just because some ingredients aren't so good

when it comes to reheating that ready meal.

To show us why, Nitisha is cooking up some chicken breast

and some pricey tuna steak.

When it comes to ready meals, the slow-cooking ingredients

are way better than these quick-cooking ingredients,

just because they're gonna cook in no time at all,

and then they're gonna end up going rubbery,

and they're really gonna affect that textural integrity,

which is what we don't want.

With tuna steak taking as little as two minutes to cook,

Nitisha's is already done.

So, if I slice this tuna steak through the middle...

..you will see, sadly, for me, that is overcooked.

In the industry, we can't serve anything in a ready meal

until it's reached a core temperature of 75 degrees,

which is what I've done here to this tuna steak.

But as a result, it's overcooked.

Now, if it's overcooked now, imagine reheating this in a ready meal.

It's just not gonna stand up, is it? The texture has been impaired.

I'm afraid the flavour might be impaired as well.

In comparison, a chicken breast

takes around five times as long to cook,

making it ideal to use in luxury ready meals.

So, if I cut this chicken breast in half...

..you can see that's beautifully cooked.

Still quite moist, actually, not dry at all.

And I think that, with some sauce, would make a perfect ready meal.

I feel confident in cooling this down

and letting it reheat again with a sauce.

It's not just tuna steak.

You're unlikely to see a fried egg in our gourmet ready meals,

and after frying one up, Nitisha is going to zap one in the microwave

to mimic 30 minutes of oven baking.

I'm gonna put it on for three minutes,

but let's keep an eye on it as it's cooking,

just to see what happens to that egg.

Almost instantly,

the fried egg starts to make some interesting noises.

So, at the minute, my egg's in there, and it does not sound good.

It sounds like it's exploding. I'm not quite sure what's going on.

After just two minutes, Nitisha rescues her fried egg.

So, this has been two minutes.

No longer a fried egg. More like a frazzled egg.

It's formed a really, really hard, crunchy skin.

It actually looks foul.

I can't see any consumer being happy with that.

Nope. Not gonna work.

It's not gonna happen. Not on my ready meals.

So, it's a no from Nitisha on fried eggs and tuna steak.

But there are other things you may find in your posh ready meal,

and they may not be as healthy as you think.

I think there's a perception that the luxury ready meals

that cost significantly more than the economy ready meals

have better sourced ingredients, have a better nutrient profile,

and therefore will be better for our health.

But surprisingly, that's not true.

I've worked in nutrition science for 25 years,

and when I started examining the back-of-pack labelling,

actually, they were no better from a health perspective

and in some instances, actually were worse for us.

To dig a little deeper

into the nutrition of chilled gourmet ready meals,

Dietitian Marcela Fiuza is comparing the traffic light labels

on their packaging with some cheaper options.

So, we've got a range of different ready meals here.

Some are kind of higher end ready meals.

Some are more affordable options.

So, if we take these two products.

So, they are supermarket own brands.

One is kind of a more expensive line.

The other one is a cheaper option.

And you can clearly have a look here at the traffic light system.

So, for the more expensive option, you see loads of red.

So, fat, saturated fat and salt.

And if we look at the more affordable option,

you see a mix of kind of amber and green.

So, from a nutritional point of view, I would say this one

is a better choice and more kind of favourable nutritional profile.

So, buying a gourmet ready meal

doesn't always mean a healthier dinner.

And it's not just posh lasagne that's the culprit.

Marcela's high-end chicken tikka and mac and cheese

both have worse nutritional values than their budget equivalent.

So, are gourmet fish pies any better?

We've got a couple of fish pies here that we can look at.

So, this is kind of a high-end, more expensive option.

And here, we have more affordable option.

So, the more expensive one doesn't actually have

a front-of-pack nutritional information,

which makes it really difficult for us to compare.

But you can find the information on the back of the pack.

Introduced in 2013 to help tackle obesity,

traffic light labelling is only a voluntary scheme,

and not all the gourmet companies subscribe to it.

So, food is really complicated,

and we know that nearly every individual food

consists of about 72,000 chemicals, which is, like, mind-blowing.

We need to enable people to make some very quick decisions

about the healthiness of a food.

So, whilst it's not perfect, by any means,

the traffic light system at least allows us

to guide someone generally on the helpfulness of that food.

After finally uncovering the nutritional information

from the back of the pack,

like many luxury ready meals, the findings are eye-opening

and something Marcela is keen to discuss with health-savvy mum Karen.

So, first, I've got two different types of fish pie.

I've got one that is a supermarket kind of brand,

and it's a more affordable option,

and I've got a more expensive option here. Yeah.

So, what would you tend to go for, usually?

I think overall,

I would probably go for a slightly more expensive meal,

simply based on the fact that I would hope that the ingredients

are of a higher quality, and so therefore I'm getting

a higher nutritious sort of meal when I'm eating it.

To roughly reflect the fat content in each meal,

Marcela, as accurately as possible, weighs out the amounts in oil.

So, this is how much fat we've got for our budget option here.

And I would like to show you how much we've got

for the more expensive option.

OK, so, this is the difference

in the amount of fat per pack of these two meals.

It's quite a quite a difference. It is. It's staggering, actually.

There's almost...

Is it surprising? It is surprising.

There's quite a significantly higher amount of fat,

obviously, in the higher price point meal,

which I hadn't anticipated, to be honest. Mm.

So it's quite eye-opening to, you know,

look at the packaging a little bit closer, perhaps,

and just really take on board, yeah, how much fat is in a meal.

Though not all fats are bad for you,

the luxury ready meal contains 25.2g of the stuff,

almost 11g more than the cheaper option.

That's almost double the fat in a smaller portion.

So, here, we've got two options of mac and cheese. Mm-hm.

We've got a more expensive option here and a budget option here.

It's not just fish pies and fat.

Many luxury ready meals also have high salt contents.

The budget mac and cheese has 1.7g of salt,

around two-and-a-half sachets' worth,

while the posh option has...

One, two, three.

..3.2g.

Over a whopping four packets of salt.

53% of our daily recommended intake.

Right, so, this is how much salt we've got.

This is on our more expensive meal, and this is on the budget meal.

I think this is a huge amount of salt.

The thought of consuming that volume of salt in one meal

in one sitting is just crazy.

It's scary. Yeah, I'm shocked by it.

There's twice the amount of salt in the higher end meal

than there is in that one, and it's a meal for one person as well.

For one person, consuming this amount of salt

in one single meal. Gosh.

So, you may be wondering,

with large amounts of salt being bad for us,

why so much in our luxury ready meals?

So, salt can be added as an ingredient,

and that's often to bring out flavour and so forth.

So, in the same way that at home, we would add salt

if we're, say, cooking a sauce,

or we might add salt to our food when we eat,

that happens at the manufacturing stage as well.

And I guess the important thing there

is that at home, we can choose more or less salt,

but if something's ready-made, the salt's already there.

So it's important for us as consumers

for manufacturers to add less to food.

So, after seeing Marcela,

it's definitely sort of been a very eye-opening experience

seeing the volume of fat that's in a meal,

but also the quantity of salt.

So I'd definitely be reconsidering my position

on buying high-end ready meals going forward.

Coming up...

Is there a new king of convenience

waiting to steal the luxury ready meal crown?

We believe recipe kits are the future of cooking at home.

NARRATOR: No sooner as the luxury ready meal

has claimed top spot in our shopping baskets,

there's a new kid on the block,

marrying the convenience and quality of a luxury ready meal

with the benefits of home cooking.

Ready meals can be divisive because they're seen, in part,

as being part of the kind of dumbing down or the unskilling of people.

So, people not being able to cook.

To fix the problem,

recipe kits from companies like HelloFresh,

Mindful Chef and Gusto

require you to actually cook your own meal

rather than bunging it in the oven.

Which doesn't sound that convenient, but millions of us would disagree.

We believe that recipe kits are the future of cooking at home.

Ordered online, the kits combine

quick and easy-to-follow recipe cards with pre-measured ingredients,

delivering gourmet-inspired dishes

straight to your door to cook at home.

For many years, people have been used to driving out

to the big supermarkets, buying in bulk, driving home,

planning their cooking.

And we try and take all of that away,

and what we leave you with is no planning, no supermarkets

and just the fun bits, really - the cooking and, of course, the eating.

Using AI systems and software algorithms

to predict customer tastes and recipe requirements,

200,000 boxes are dispatched each week

from their purpose-built factory.

So, at any given time,

we have a selection of hundreds of recipes online.

And as customers are ordering and buying from us,

we're getting a good idea of what's popular

and how many recipes we're going to sell.

Because we understand the popularity from very early on in the process,

we can forecast really accurately

and then only order the ingredients from our suppliers

that we actually need.

The system enables the tracking of each ingredient

to ensure they get to the correct customer.

So, these are the boxes where the food is actually put into.

The bar code is scanned, and then it moves up into our storage unit

and picking facility, that we call "the tower".

So, without these boxes and the bar codes,

we essentially wouldn't be able to trace the product

as it goes through our systems.

And that's really important cos we need to know

exactly which ingredient goes to which customer at any point in time.

And we also need to manage stock levels.

So, as we're picking,

it's really important to say, "We're running low on potatoes."

We know that, and then we can put more potatoes into the system

so that we're always constantly picking

and making sure boxes are flowing out to customers

as quickly as possible.

Back in Wigan, working mum Samantha

is keen to put the recipe kit phenomenon to the test.

My first thought on these, in terms of convenience and things like that,

is that they're kind of a bit of a hybrid, aren't they?

So it kind of eliminates some of that mum guilt.

Like, you're still doing the cooking,

you're still getting to experience that side of it,

but the convenience of it means that it's less onerous.

But my first thoughts are that they could be quite expensive long-term.

After opting for four dishes, it will be up to a two-day wait

for Samantha's meals to make their way through the factory.

The whole process is automated.

So, the red boxes are first created,

and then these chilled boxes are put inside,

and then that box is then assigned a bar code.

And that's the point where it becomes a particular customer's box

and not just anyone's box.

It's then pushed into the pick tower.

The pick tower is the heart of the factory.

Spread over three floors and incorporating 144 pick faces,

it's where the customer's box will be loaded

with the correct ingredients.

The system is routeing the boxes into these pick faces.

Once they come in, the system will tell the picker

exactly what to pick.

So, each one of these totes

will have a unique and different ingredient,

and the lights that come on

are telling the picker which ingredients to put in which box.

So, here at the top, we've got something here.

What have we got? Nigella seeds.

So, in this case, the box needs two packs of Nigella seeds.

Once those have been picked, you hit the button

and then move on to the next ingredient.

Each box takes around 30 minutes to complete its journey

before being moved to dispatch.

But with customers being able to save up to 74%

by buying the ingredients at the supermarket,

are recipe boxes worth it?

The ready meal kit business is phenomenal.

I think they're expensive.

I don't think they're great value for money,

and all of them could be replicated at home very simply

if you had the ingredients.

So, we're back to time, and we're back to prep,

and we're back to an understanding of how to assemble food.

At a cost of 35.99, Samantha's box has arrived.

Right, so, let's have a look.

So, it's a really full box,

and straight away, I can see everything is really nice and fresh.

So, it looks good, but to find out how easy it is to cook,

she's whipping up the teriyaki chicken,

something she's never made before.

I feel like I am actually cooking a homemade meal,

and it doesn't feel too hard.

It feels OK. It feels manageable.

It feels like, do you know what?

I could actually do this, middle of the week,

you know, a school night, something like that,

and it wouldn't really be a problem.

With companies like HelloFresh,

Mindful Chef and Gusto proving popular,

the kit meal market is projected to make over £1 billion.

The kit market is one of the fastest growing sectors

of what we have to call the ready meal category.

They have come up with almost the perfect solution,

which is, we know it's good ingredients

because we've got them in our hands.

They get delivered to us as ingredients we can see.

We know we're going to get a successful meal

because we know the recipe works, and we just feel good about it

cos it tastes good at the end as well.

In just 20 minutes,

Samantha's teriyaki chicken is done.

And to put it to the test,

she's invited her friend Carolyn to give it a whirl.

So, what do you think? Look what I made.

Oh, my gosh, I'm so impressed.

Oh, I'm gonna go in for the chicken first, I think.

Big piece of chicken.

Mmm.

Twenty minutes, that is so good.

That's really nice. Mmm. And the spice.

Mmm, it's nice. Mmm, it's really good.

So, it's a big thumbs-up for the recipe box.

But do they do enough to take the luxury ready meal crown?

So, in terms of balance, I think there is, you know, a place

for both the ready meal in people's lives

as well as the recipe box.

For me as a mum,

I've got the opportunity to do a little bit of cooking,

but a lot of the hard work is saved for me if I use that recipe box.

And then you can balance it up with those extra-busy nights

where you haven't really got time to sit down

and make a whole meal from scratch.

You can use the ready meals for those kinds of evenings.

So, there we have it.

In a world where we have less and less time,

we now demand more and more from our convenience food.

And while the ready meal has evolved

from something you slap in the microwave

to luxury restaurant quality,

they do come at a cost to your health and your wallet,

so spend wisely.