New Banquet Fruit Pies

Did you know that ConAgra, harnessing their vast Small Pie Technology developed over years of producing edible pot pies, have introduced a new line of fruit pies?  I'd noticed them a few months ago in Dollar Tree (ha!  What does that tell you?) but only recently decided to try them as they've started hitting the regular supermarkets in my area.

So I bought one of each variety - Apple, Cherry-Berry, and Peach - and a couple of nights ago, I cooked them up for Maryanne, Lynnafred, and myself.  They cooked up just fine, with the expected amount of ugliness around the edges.  I'm not going to hold that against Banquet; frozen stuff cracks and breaks with the jostling of transit, and broken pie edges leak a little when they heat up.  Hell, my homemade pies leak a little most of the time.  Trouble is, leaking at the edges is the least of the faults here.

Look back up at the pictures on the box.  Notice how the little pie cuts are simply bursting with fruit.  I know that cover art is not necessarily representative of the actual product, but in this case the cover art has little to do with reality.  None of the pies had more than the smallest amount of actual fruit - a few pieces at most swimming in a vast pool of starch-thickened juice.  And this isn't just a subjective observation; the apple and peach pies both had "lemon juice" listed before the apples or peaches, and the cherry berry pie listed cherry juice and wheat flour listed before the fruit.

We tried the Cherry Berry Pie first.  There were some blueberries and a couple of shriveled cherries floating in the sea of purply-red goop.  The flavor was odd; I thought it had a vaguely chemical aftertaste - Lynn said it tasted the way an electrical fire smelled.  Maryanne simply wrinkled her nose at it and said, "Well that one isn't very good."

The Peach Pie had better flavor - more like a "real" peach pie but still much less like anything I would intentionally buy and serve.  A small number of small square peach cuts wallowed in large amounts of thick sloppy syrup  There was so little actual fruit in it that the pie, divided into three, didn't have enough to go around:  Lynnafred's portion had but a single tiny peach morsel.

The Apple Pie seemed to be Banquet's way of combining the worst aspects of the other two, bringing the resinous aftertaste of the Cherry Berry type together with the near-total lack of fruit in the Peach Pie.  Kind of a shame because there's a fairly decent apple-vanilla thing going on in there that could have been enjoyable if only there was some, you know, apple in it.

Stretching for something positve to say about them, I will mention that they do not contain HFCS.  Bravo, ConAgra, you get a point for that one.

Banquet's Fruit Pies sell for about a buck a piece no matter where they are found, whether it's ShopRite, Save-A-Lot, or Dollar Tree.  This is one of the very few times that I've actually felt ripped off buying something to review for the blog - at half price, you still wouldn't be getting your money's worth.

Bonus:  Dave Rants About Bloggers Who Kiss Ass

If you plug "Banquet Fruit Pie" into a Google search, you will find LOADS of positive reviews of these sparsely-fruited nasties.  Apparently, a "mommy blogger" webportal called "Mom Central" teamed up with Banquet to buy a shitload of positive word-of-mouth.  Banquet provided coupons and Mom Central paid the bloggers with gift cards, and in return it looks like all of the bloggers wrote glowing articles about the pies.  Each of the articles includes - sometimes in tiny print - the following mandated disclaimer:

So.  Because all these bloggers took coupons and a gift card for writing up the pies, none of them had the balls to stand up and say "Thanks for the coupons, Banquet, but these pies suck and that's what I'm going to write."  Don't these people have any pride (or integrity?)

It's situations like this that made me grateful for the FCC rules that require bloggers to disclose when their posts are sponsored.  That simple little rule might not keep douchebags honest, but it will at least help clue you in that a given blog might not be totally unbiased.

And yes, I do accept coupons from manufacturers and samples for review.  I've been upfront about that since the blog opened (before the FCC rules were put into effect.)  But, as it states in my policies, the companies that take advantage of that do so at their own risk, because my blog entries aren't for sale, and stuff that sucks is going to get called out no matter who paid to put it on my table.
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