Hey there, I'm back with another insightful product comparison. You may remember my last blog comparing different products, which was based on chocolate spread. Well this time I will be reviewing two different types of Rich-Tea biscuit.

For those of you who live under a rock, Rich-Teas are a staple of every Englishman's diet. They go well with everything, they go excellently on their own, and they're very addicting.

I am actually sampling these products as I write this, so you'll have my very first thoughts right as I'm having them.

The two brands in question are:

Sainsbury's 'Basics' Rich Tea Biscuits'

And:

Rich Tea Biscuits By Sainsbury's.

Now don't be fooled into thinking that just because they come from the same store, they are the same product. Oh no.

Sainsbury's Basics is the equivalent of Tesco Value, another reference which wo't help Americans in any way.
Basically they're the dirt-cheap affordable ones, like if you're on a really tight budget because you're trying to pay for an education or something. This pack cost me 30p, and contains 300g of biscuits.

The other pack, while still Sainsbury's product, is slightly more expensive and should be slightly better, seeing as it's a Sainsbury's own product, and not just Sainsbury's Basics. This one cost me 40p, and contains only 200g of biscuit. They'd better be significantly better or that's been a considerable waste of money.

For the sake of ease on my part, I'll be referring to the normal pack as "Pack A" and the Basics pack as "Pack B". B for 'Basic'. Pretty easy to remember.

Initial Observations

The obvious thing is the significant size difference between the packs. Pack A measures 15cm tall, whereas Pack B measures a whopping 22.5 cm tall.

Pack A is cyan blue, with a picture of a rich tea biscuit being dunked into a mug of tea. The photo and colour add a personal touch, to show that they care about aesthetics when presenting you with your biscuits. Pack B, on the other hand, dons a white and orange colour scheme, with a 'fancy' font and a stylised line drawing of a biscuit being dunked into tea.

While the colour scheme on Pack B isn't too bad in its own right, it makes it look somewhat tacky. This and the fact that every Sainsbury's Basics product has the same colour scheme makes it seem more generic and impersonal. I understand it's so you can easily recognise a Sainsbury's Basics product from the masses of other products on the shelves, but it carries with it a certain expectation of low quality, which is not an expectation Sainsbury's want to encourage.

Then again, perhaps they do, and it's to encourage you to opt for the more expensive products. These supermarkets are rascally devils.

Upon attempting to open both packages, however, I discovered something terrible.
Pack A has one of those useful little tabs you can pull to make opening the pack easier, but Pack B does not! How did they get these things onto the shelves with such a huge design flaw?!

Biscuit Impressions

Despite the struggle to open Pack B, I managed to gain access to the biscuity goodness within each wrapper.

The biscuits themselves are indistinguishable in terms of appearance. They have the ideal diameter, fitting snugly into your average cup, perfect for dunking in beverages.

In terms of taste, the two are very, very similar. It seems, and this could just be a mistake on my taste buds' part, that the biscuits from Pack A are ever so slightly more substantial and ever so slightly softer than their Pack B counterparts.

Crunchy biscuits are good, but the Pack B ones seem a tiny bit too crunchy, so I found the ones from Pack A to be preferable in that regard.
Also, the Pack B ones seemed slightly airier than the Pack A ones, and obviously I much prefer biscuit in my biscuits than air in my biscuits.

Conclusions

While the Pack A biscuits were of slightly higher quality, the improvement was almost indistinguishable, and could even have just been my imagination. I think there's even the possibility that these are literally the same biscuits in different packaging, in which case Sainsbury's is clearly trying to pull a fast one on me.

However, in the end I'd go with the Basics ones, since even if they are actually slightly worse than the Pack A ones, the difference is so small that the extra quantity and cheaper price more than make up for it.

Of course, it seems to only way for me to be absolutely sure is to scoff down all of them.