How to choose bagged salads

The warmer weather means more salads with meals. Get the most from your store-bought option and increase your daily vege serves.

There’s a huge range of bagged or packaged salads available at the supermarkets. You can buy individual serves or share-packs.

There are single leaf packs (such as baby spinach or cos) and mixes (such as mesclun or baby spinach and kale) and, of course, coleslaw mixes. Salad mixes are an easy and convenient way to get fibre, vitamins, minerals and phytonutrients which are essential to keeping us healthy and active.

Some packs of salad are sold without the dressing, meaning it’s easier to make your own healthy choice when choosing how to dress your salad. But if you opt for a bag of salad with dressing included, here’s how to choose the best ones.

Saturated fat

It’s the dressing and any nuts, seeds and cheese in the salad bag that increase the saturated fat content. Several of the bagged salads with dressings we found had sachets of seeds, croutons and cheese, as well as the dressing sachet. Because these are packaged separately it allows us to choose whether we have them or not, and how much we want to add.

We recommend choosing bagged salads that contain 2g or less saturated fat per 100g.

Sodium

We find sodium in the dressing or additional toppings.

Having too much sodium in our diet can increase our blood pressure which is a risk factor for heart disease, and it’s easy to consume more than recommended. So, when buying packaged foods, it’s important to read and compare nutrition labels. The sodium content of the rest of our meal is important too, so if other components of your meal are higher in sodium be sure to choose a lower sodium salad or simply reduce the amount of dressing or topping you use.

We recommend choosing bagged salads that contain 200mg or less sodium per 100g.

Sugar

The World Health organization recommends we limit the free sugars in our diet. Using the dressing in these bagged salads adds to our daily sugar total, but it doesn’t have to add a lot.

We recommend choosing bagged salads that contain 5g or less sugar per 100g.

How to choose

Use these criteria to compare bagged salads/salad mixes

Vegie serves

Given these salads range from 69-89 per cent veges, the rest being the dressing, 100g is a close enough approximation to a vegetable serve.