A kilo of ready-made salad costs more than a kilo of chicken breast
A ready lunch box from the chiller costs 10.99 zł and weighs 255 grams. That's 43.10 zł per kilo of food. For comparison, a kilo of fresh chicken breast in the same shop costs 25.49 zł.
The box holds pasta, chicken, mozzarella, olives and salad leaves. The label gives the proportions: vegetables 33 percent, cooked pasta 23.5 percent, roasted chicken breast strips 15.7 percent. All of it comes to 390 calories and just under 18 grams of protein.
We cooked the same thing in a pan, on today's prices:
- chicken breast 160 g: 4.08 zł
- farfalle pasta 80 g: 0.64 zł
- broccoli 120 g: 1.44 zł
- pesto, 2 tablespoons: 1.10 zł
- garlic, one clove: 0.16 zł
- oil, one teaspoon: 0.04 zł
That's 7.45 zł a portion, for 645 calories and 52 grams of protein. Against the box: 3.54 zł cheaper, half again as many calories and nearly three times the protein. It takes half an hour.
As always, 7.45 zł is the cost of what you use, not the receipt. At the till you put down whole packs: half a kilo of breast at 12.75 zł, 500 g of pasta at 3.99, broccoli at 5.99, pesto at 6.99 and garlic at 7.99, about 38 zł in total. That yields three of these portions, and the pasta, pesto and garlic stay in the cupboard for other meals.
Fair play to the other side: the box wins where there is no kitchen. It's cold, ready, fits in a bag and leaves nothing to wash up. If you're counting minutes at the office rather than złoty, it's a sensible buy and nobody is being fooled.
The rule going forward is simple: with a ready meal, divide the price by the weight on the pack. When that comes out above a kilo of meat, you know you're mostly paying for someone else having assembled it.
Snugmeal plans a week of meals like this and prices them in your shop, so the total matches at the till.
It launches this autumn. Leave your address in the form just below this post, and at launch you'll get a one-time 20% discount code for your first subscription.
Data: the lunch box price, ingredient list and nutrition read live from its product page on zakupy.biedronka.pl on 12 August 2026. The portion cost comes from our recipe database, recalculated this week on current prices; only the rapeseed oil, 4 groszy of the 7.45, comes from an older reading, because that product isn't stocked in the online shop. Our own calculations.