One of the main low-grade shops of choice round these parts is Home Bargains, home of discount brands you know and discontinued brands the manufacturers would rather forget.

I go there quite a lot.

I was after olive oil, which I found easily and should have left it at that. But this kind of shop has a hold on me, and I end up walking around buying crap I know I do not need and probably will never use or, in the case of foodstuffs, eat.

Which brings me to the marshmallow-based sweet I bought today – faux fries!

I’ve seen the jelly burgers on many occasions, as I am sure has everyone else and haven’t ever felt the need to buy one. Not in years, anyway. But these fries had me in their grip with ease for one reason, and one reason alone; look at the image. Can you see?

That’s right – faux ketchup! It had to be a purchase, and so it was. Along with some toilet rolls. The nature of end of line foods is their unpredictable results when they interact with the human digestive system, so a good selection of toilet roll is an essential in my home.

The fries themselves were yellow and textured uncannily like real fries – a bit speckled and soft yet with a little resistance on chewing. The similarity ended there however, as despite their yellow colouring, they were strawberry flavoured. Clearly the manufacturers were taking serious risks here, already going against the food colours rules. Need a refresher?

Yellow is for banana, red is for strawberry and blue is for raspberry…for some reason.

You can’t play fast and loose with the rules and expect to get away with it. Clearly this was an omen of something bad yet to happen.

So now you can see the faux fries covered in the faux ketchup. The ketchup itself was just your standard strawberry syrup, the kind you would have had on an ice cream cone on many occasions, but with one crucial difference: this syrup was utterly, unspeakably vile.

The taste was nothing like strawberry, and it’s consistency too watery to adequately fulfil the sauce function. In fact the majority of it dripped out of the bottom of the packaging and onto my work surface.

And with that, it all went in the bin. The rather nice marshmallow fries were ruined by the vile sauce.

And that, I guess, is why the product may not be long for this world.