McDonald’s Fruit & Walnut Salad (Food)

I’ve been seeing a lot of advertisements for the new McDonald’s Fruit & Walnut Salad so today I thought I would give it a try.

The fruit in the salad consist of a number of apple slices with a handful of grapes thrown in for good measure. For some reason I expected more then this. It’s probably because they bill it as a Fruit & Walnut Salad so I expected it to have multiple types of fruit. I guess technically two type of fruit constitutes “fruit” but I must say I was a bit disappointed.

The quality of the apple slices were decent, nothing spectacular here; just average quality apple slices. The grapes were a bit on the tart side and did not have a lot of flavor, but this could vary from salad to salad so your experience may be different.

The walnut portion of the salad is a small bag (0.75oz) of Diamond Candied Walnuts. These were tasty, but again nothing to kill for. I’ve had better nuts on plane flights. They also add significantly to the caloric content of the salad, the small bag coming in at 140 calories.

As a dipping sauce for the fruit, McDonald’s includes a small container of their low fat yogurt. Since I really love McDonald’s yogurt, this was the high point of the salad for me.

With tax included, the Fruit & Walnut Salad cost $3.15, which seemed to me a bit on the high side considering the relatively small portion of food.

The salad also seemed to be a bit higher in calories then I would have expected. As mentioned above, the walnuts contain 140 calories; add to that 60 calories for the yogurt and 100 calories for the apple slices and the whole thing contains 300 calories. (They don’t seem to be able to add on the McDonalds website, their nutrition listing for the salad says that 140 + 60 + 100, equals 310)

So considering all of the above factors, I could not recommend this salad. The ingredients are limited, taste is adequate and both the price and caloric content don’t make it worth it.

If you are looking for a healthy dessert option at McDonald’s, I’d recommend the Fruit ‘n Yogurt Parfait instead. It has better flavor, is less expensive and has only 160 calories. It’s also a much better bang for the buck.

3 out of 10 Stars

Posted by Al on 01/11/10 at 06:11 PM in Other