How many Mini Eggs can you get for £1?

Products are shrinking; Patrick once counted crisps; and Easter is upon us. I’ve been inspired by all three and tasked myself with answering your burning Easter question – how many Mini Eggs do you get for £1?

Mini Eggs are everywhere this time of year – they reportedly enjoyed £15.7m in sales last year. There isn’t a supermarket aisle in the country you can venture down without being presented with some sort of never-ending special offer on Cadbury’s hard-shelled seasonal chocolates.

You’ll encounter a variety of different types of packaging among those offers, each weighing differently but often keeping one thing in common – the price.

Weights should of course give an indication as to which is going to win, but there’s only one stat anyone will be interested in here, and that’s exactly how many eggs your £1 returns. That’s where I come in…

Counting Mini Eggs

I’ve picked out three of the most common types of Mini Eggs packaging, all of which are regularly available from big name supermarkets at the price of £1. Here’s what I found:

The 90g bag – the most readily available, and therefore the one you’re most likely to buy – 28-29 eggs
The 103g tube – less prominently displayed, but widely stocked – 32-33 eggs
The 41.5g carton – tucked away on the shelves and sold as part of three for £1 deals (and therefore, a total 124.5g) – 38 eggs in total (13, 13, 12)

In my snapshot test, the weight has proved an accurate indication to the number of eggs. But the key takeaway here is the psychological effect of both the packaging and the marketing. The cartons look tiny by comparison to their bigger brothers, yet they give the clearest value for money. Your £1 returns you an additional nine eggs to the bag – that’s 31% more chocolate for your money.

So it’s always worth investigating further when it comes to special offers, especially when there are multi-packs involved.

Has the way a product’s been packaged ever influenced your buying decisions? I’d love to hear your views. In the meantime, I’ll be buying cartons of Mini Eggs this Easter.

william says:

3 April 2015

This will be the first year in many many years that I won;t be having mini or creme eggs. My own personal boycott of all things Cadbury’s.

The other thing you need to watch out for are supermarkets who start selling Easter eggs on offer when they’ve not been at a higher price for 28 days prior to going on offer. Naughty tactic. Tesco I’m wise to your tricks !!

John Ward says:

4 April 2015

I thought the whole point about Easter Eggs is that they go on sale in January.

They do, and in January Tesco started selling them on special offer. It took them 2 weeks after I copied them on a tweet to Trading Standards to change the label to NEW. Come February I would have had no issue with them using the phrase special offer.

They know should rules better than I do and shouldn’t needing reminding every time they get it wrong, which is fairly often.

wavechange says:

I presume that the rules have legal backing. A few successful prosecutions should help provide Tesco and every other company remember their obligations.

How many companies have been prosecuted for this ‘mistake’?

dieseltaylor says:

Good points william

If 124.5g of eggs can be purchased for £1, that makes the unit price 80p per 100g or £8 per kg. Hopefully this is on the shelf label.

I suggest that we all ignore whether a product is supposed to be on offer or not and focus on the unit price to decide if we are getting good value for money. I presume that the companies are still playing tricks is that we are not using unit prices.

Of course supermarkets often don’t show the unit prices on offers such as 3 for one. It needs to be made law that unit prices are shown for all multi-buy offers.

George asks whether the way a product is packaged ever influences our buying decisions. I should think well over half of Easter Egg sales, in whichever form they are sold, are intended as gifts, and the packaging might be an important consideration. A certain [and possibly rising] proportion of sales, however, are to people who just want to glut out on sticky goo in a choccy casing. For those consumers the wrapping is totally immaterial and the eggs might just as well be sold unwrapped in a clear plastic box like the flapjack pieces and where the unit price should be the sole criterion.

dyfnwal says:

27 April 2015

For the last few months, a relative has complained about the increasing difficulty in making gravy using Whitworths cornflour. She is having to add more cornflour than she has had to use in previous years, as the gravy is taking longer to thicken. Is there less starch in it or is there another reason? We did not check the weight of the newly purchased box.

Amy says:

29 February 2016

How can the 45g carton have more in than the 90g bag but weigh half the amount? I dont understand

George Martin says:

2 March 2016

Hi Amy – at the time the cartons were being sold three for £1, so it was more about how many eggs your £1 could get you, rather than which singular option was best to opt for. Hope that helps! George.

Dean Samways says:

15 April 2017

I’ve just come back from the shop with some Mini Eggs for my nieces and nephews (definitely not me) so I thought I’d give this Conversation? an Easter 2017 update…

So, a 90g bag in 2017 costs the same it did in 2015, i.e. one whole British pound. Your new counterfeit £1 coin will now buy you 28 Mini Eggs, the same amount 100 pennies would get you in 2015.

So, nothing to see here. At least it was a tasty experiment.

Has anyone else bought either of the two other Mini Egg packets listed above? Perhaps you’d like to update us on your findings before you gobble them all down 🙂

Happy Easter everyone!

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