If you want one indication of the decline of Britain in 2025, it is the image that Tesco put out of their new, repellent ‘birthday cake’ sandwich, crowned with a single lonely candle. If you really despised someone, buying them one of these new sandwiches, which is essentially a Victoria sponge cake but in portable form, and offering it to them as a gift would be an effective way of indicating your disdain. However, for the rest of us, this unlovely marketing gimmick is yet another indication of how the honourable English sandwich, the office worker’s traditional lunchtime snack, has been debased and made ‘fun’. It is another reminder that the old adage that you should not play with your food is as relevant today as it has ever been.
The tragedy is that the vast majority of supermarket sandwiches taste horrible
It is not difficult to see what possessed Tesco to come out with this new foodstuff. Marks and Spencer had a viral hit a few weeks ago with a bizarre but oddly successful strawberries and cream sandwich, or, in their parlance, a ‘Red Diamond Strawberry and Crème sandwich’. It was unusual enough to become a star on TikTok, and for the first few days of its existence – coinciding with an unusually hot spell – it became sufficiently popular for shoppers to rush to branches of M&S early to be assured of buying their sweet treat. The website marketing now boasts that:
It’s light, luscious and bursting with classic strawberry-and-cream flavour – no wonder this must-try limited edition treat went viral.
Never mind that it was a straightforward rip-off of the sweet Japanese fruit sando, which has been a mainstay in that country’s bakeries for a while; it was sufficiently novel to have attracted attention and sales alike.
Tesco’s birthday cake sandwich, therefore, just looks like a rushed attempt at ripping off a competitor; something that we have come to expect from Aldi and Lidl, but less so from Britain’s leading supermarket. And, in truth, it does not sound like something that many people would want to eat, even as a sweet treat. It contains a noxious amount of sugar (31 grams, to be exact) and constitutes nearly half of an adult’s recommended intake of saturated fat.
If it was the most delicious thing known to man, then such indulgence would be permissible, but it’s ultimately a rather miserable-looking jam sandwich with cream and extra sparkles: yours for a mere £3. As with the M&S offering, it is a limited edition offering, designed to hit the shelves of a thousand supermarkets for four weeks and then to disappear off into the ether forever.
Yet there will be similar horrible offerings, sweet and savoury alike, from both Tesco and its competitors. Everything from a bread-encased roast dinner sandwich to – naturally – the full English breakfast sandwich can be found on their shelves, ready to entice or repulse customers, depending on taste.
The tragedy is that the vast majority of supermarket sandwiches taste horrible. The fillings are pumped full of artificial preservatives, the bread is either soggy or stale and the whole caboodle is as far from what the Earl of Sandwich imagined when he asked for his dinner to be brought to him between two slices of bread as can be possible. Yet because we are a society that is addicted both to the illusion of choice and endless novelty, there will be another viral-oriented horror in a few weeks, some other shotgun marriage between two wildly disparate kinds of food, and no doubt it, too, will sell in vast quantities.
For those of us who hanker for something simple – ham and cheese, say – we should accept that such conservatism is out of kilter with the desire to put pictures of one’s lunch on social media. Unfortunately, the latter urge is likely to win out, and that will be to our endless detriment.
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