Piller’s SIMPLY FREE..

.. is a range of packaged cooked meats, cold cuts if you prefer.

The packaging is quite nice, soft pastel natural colours, and the words ‘Simply Free’ in a larger text size than any other text on the packaging. Yes, this looks to be a product which you could serve up to your family, basking in the knowledge that you had done them a great favour.

What is Piller’s ‘Simply Free’ free from exactly. I can tell you from the more wording on the packing.. ALLERGENS. It gets better all of the time, doesn’t it.

The product, bearing in mind that it is a meat type is free from:

• Gluten
• Milk
• Peanuts
• Tree nuts
• Mustard
• Sesame
• Egg
• Fish
• Soy
• Sulphites

I don’t know about you, but I would not expect to find ANY of the above list in a slice of ham or Salami. The funniest is ‘FISH’. Imagine that, no FISH in a ham/Salami product.

Piller’s is having us on because the list of ingredients on the back of the Salami pack reads:

• Pork
• Sea Salt
• Cane Sugar
• Spices
• Cultured Celery Extract
• Garlic
• Starter Culture
• Smoke

For those of you who don’t know, the Celery extract is SODIUM. Starter Culture could be anything at all, and Spices is also a little vague.

By weight, the percentage of SODIUM in the Salami product is 17%, and for the ham, it is 18%.

So we now know that Piller’s cooked meats, cold cuts don’t have anything that one would expect NOT to be in there, but it has a nice healthy helping of the big S, SODIUM.

The only saving grace is that they were purchased at around half of the suggested retail price. Will I be buying them again?

Sorry, Mr. Piller’s Fine Foods of Waterloo, Ontario, but the answer is a resounding NO. My decision is not based upon the product itself as I have tasted worse, but because you are trying to mislead the consumer into believing that it is a better product than others, and I very much doubt that this could be substantiated in any lab or consumer tests..