Critique: Del Pino’s Spaghetti and Meatballs

I love reading the ingredients on some of the canned products that appear on grocery shelves these days. Take a can of Spaghetti and meatballs I recently brought home, for instance. This product, made by a company called Del Pino’s, shows a picture on the can of five meatballs nestled in a bed of pasta and what appears to be some sort of tomato sauce. So let’s take a close look shall we?

Turns out the tomatoes actually consist of a mix of tomato puree and water. OOOK. The pasta is wheat gluten and the meatballs were made from a combination of beef, pork, water and crackermeal (whatever that is). The can cost .79 cents and for that amount of money you get a total of 418 grams or about 15 ounces of product. There is a best by stamp of January 24, 2013 on one end of the can so this stuff can hang out on a shelf for quite a while before you have to eat it. I’m guessing there are more preservatives than you’d really want to know about in each can. So, let’s see how the stuff tastes…

Since there are only 280 calories in the entire can, I elected to do just that. Eat the entire can. Part of the effect of doing so will insure a not so healthy does of salt to the tune of 1050 milligrams or about half the average daily adult allowance. Carbohydrates came in at 34 grams which is about a quarter of the daily allowance and it is relatively high in saturated fats at 5 grams. But, I digress. After nuking the contents for a couple of minutes in the microwave, I shot a picture of the meal which shows the meatballs covered with a thick sauce. Those meatballs tasted pretty good and what really makes this meal is the thick and savory sauce that was delicious. My overall opinion is that we have a winner here. I give this one a solid 8 on a scale of 10.

Del Pino’s is distributed by Save A Lot stores of Earth City Missouri.