Lifting the lid on Celebrations & Heroes
Mars Celebrations. What are we celebrating exactly?
I visited my local Tesco metro and was poking around the shelves, trying in vain to find something other than Cornish pasties and energy drinks, when I came across the new 180g pouch of Celebrations – on a special price of ‘just’ two pounds. Several emotions washed over me as I stood there, Red Bull and Ginsters in hand.
Due to my eclectic-design loving nature, I thought ‘how cool, lots of little things in wrappers all producing a myriad colour and shapes, contained in a semi-clear bag, producing a very busy, but pleasing visual feast!’
That soon gave way to outrage, ‘What a fricking waste of money! Two quid for that – I might as well by the bloody bars individually. How dare they!’
Having experienced both sides of the emotional chocolate gambit, and calming down a sufficient amount, I though I’d work out just how much of a rip-off it really is.
Using the larger boxes, of both Celebrations and Cadbury’s Heroes, as the benchmark, due to the combined weight of the required selection of regular sized bars, exceeding the smaller sized boxes. So I bought all the bars necessary and whipped out my calculator to do the sums.
A 420g box of Mars Celebrations cost me £3.84, which works out at 91.5p per 100g. The equivalent regular bars, at supermarket prices – usually 10-15 pence cheaper than convenience stores/garage forecourts – came to £3.02 and weighed 352g. Working out at a slightly cheaper 85.5p per 100g.
Cadbury’s Heroes weighed in at 400g, costing £3.18 or 79.5p per 100g, the equivalent bars worked out at 77p per 100g.
Given that you have a greater selection to hand, can pick and choose your flavour combinations, and have lots of shiny wrappers, the outrageously, overpriced mini-bar boxes are actually worth it.
Chocolate pie - see what I did there?
I have given a break down of the constituent parts, of both Heroes and Celebrations, so one can immediately see which variety holds heavyweight status in the box. Even though I don’t like Snickers or Bounty, I think I would still buy the assortment over the individual bars. I know empirically that it’s (marginally) more expensive to buy the bars, more so if you don’t plan on eating all the varietals, but, people I implore you, look at the shiny wrappers and all the ickle mini chocolate bars!
Well done you!!!I agree that mini choccy bars are way more fun, but bounty and snickers are by far the best!!! No waste if we shared a box of the choccies in question!!!
I’d really like to see your workings out too. Did you calculate the exact cost of the equivalent weight of each individual bar type, or just an overall cost of an approximately similar split to the selection boxes, rounded to the nearest whole bar per type?
Either way, I would say you’re being distracted, magpie-like, by the glitter of shiny paper, and overlooking another side to the sums: judging the pie chart by eye, I’d say your loathed Snickers + Bounty make up 25% of the weight of the box (and therefore of the cost). So that’s 25% wasted. Then, you may find all the others edible, but I doubt you love them all… f’rinstance, Milky Way, that’s got to be a slightly forced swallow, late at night down towards the bitter end of the box, hasn’t it? And it’s another 10%… so surely you’ve got to take into account that about 35% of the Celebratory money spent is for stuff you don’t really want, so it’s not 6p per 100g difference, it’s more like 36p. That’s practically a Yorkie.
As Amanda says, there’s no waste in an ideal world of mutually compatible preferences, but that’s a Utopia we’re unlikely to see in our lifetime.
And then there’s the negative environmental impact of all the extra packaging and bla bla bla
Chuck us a mini Eclair, will you?
ps. I think you should apply the same calculation to bags of washed mixed salad next.
So Tom, here’s how it was calculated…
I worked out the combined cost of buying one bar of each of the varieties featured in each box, then worked out the combined weight. I felt there was no point trying to work out the proportion of the single bars, based on the proportion of each variety – after all, you can’t buy half a bag of Maltesers.
I tried to get the best value for each, so the boxes are the standard ‘large’ size (therefore covering, and exceeding the combined weight of the bars) and the bars were at supermarket prices – much cheaper than newsagents and garages.
I take your point re: Bounty and Snickers, but I would choose Heroes over Celebrations – purely because I like ALL of the Cadbury’s selection.