Breakfast Best Breakfast Bowl: Meat Lovers or Sausage and Gravy

This post contains affiliate links.

Around here, we like to say that breakfast is an important meal. After a long night of sleep, taking in some morning calories helps us stay focused for whatever we have planned in the day ahead. For me, during the week, that consists of a bowl of cereal, while for my wife it might be yogurt.

On weekends, we often do a more traditional hot breakfast. Eggs are a given, accompanied by a meat (maybe sausage, maybe bacon) and a starch (maybe toast, maybe a hash brown). On occasion, pancakes, waffles, or biscuits and gravy may enter the mix, and on still rarer occasions we might mix things up with an English tray bake or something more off-the-wall.

We make our weekend breakfast food ourselves and, in fact, I personally enjoy taking the time to orchestrate and cook up a quality hot first meal. Not everyone has the time or the energy, though, and for those reasons grocers often sell heat-and-eat breakfast items that can be whipped up in a few minutes.

Aldi has been selling breakfast bowls for years, and five years ago I wrote about them. I decided to revisit them to see what, if anything, had changed.

Breakfast Best Breakfast Bowls are an Aldi Regular Buy. You can find them in stores all the time, at any time of the year. They come in individually prepackaged 7-ounce bowls — a little less than half a pound — inside cardboard boxes.

The bowls come in a mixed case that includes Meat Lovers and Sausage and Gravy. Sausage and Gravy was previously an Aldi Find but has since become a Regular Buy, replacing a Sausage bowl that Aldi does not carry as a Regular Buy any longer.

The bowls currently cost $1.99 each. That’s 20 cents more than we paid in 2019. A name-brand Jimmy Dean Breakfast Bowl currently costs $2.97 at Walmart and $3.19 at Target, both of which are also higher than they cost in 2019. Walmart also sells a Great Value Breakfast Bowl that is, currently, about the same price as the Aldi bowl. Overall, while you could probably make these Aldi bowls yourself for less, they’re still a competitive price compared to other heat-and-eat bowls.

Most bowls like this have similar instructions and cook times. There is one small difference between the two Aldi bowls in one of the steps, though.

To prepare both of them, first first remove the bowl from the cardboard carton and puncture the film. Next, microwave on high for two minutes. Remove the film and stir. The difference at this point is that the Meat Lovers bowl calls for replacing the film, while the Sausage and Gravy does not. Either way, you microwave for one more minute, then let sit for one minute after that before serving. The product will be hot.

Breakfast Best Meat Lovers Bowl

This bowl, which has been on Aldi shelves for years, boasts potatoes, eggs, sausage, cheddar cheese, and bacon. The ingredients are very much what I would associate with a traditional breakfast bowl.

This bowl is savory and flavorful. I thought it was maybe a little high in potato proportions compared to eggs and bacon, but there is still a good amount of everything here. The texture was fine — maybe a little soft on account of it being heated from frozen, but nevertheless decent.

Nutritionally, each bowl has 440 calories, 33 grams of fat (42% of the recommended daily value), 14 grams of saturated fat (70%), and 980 milligrams of sodium (43%). It also has 24 grams of protein and a solid amount of calcium and iron.

The ingredients are typical of an ultra-processed food. The list includes additives like maltodextrin, modified cornstarch, xanthan gum, and some other extras in addition to the core ingredients of eggs, potatoes, sausage, cheese, and bacon. Two allergens are listed, milk and eggs.

Breakfast Best Sausage and Gravy Bowl

As I mentioned earlier, this was once just a limited-time Aldi Find, but it has since become a Regular Buy alongside the Meat Lovers. The box lists the main ingredients as potatoes, country gravy, eggs, sausage crumbles, and cheddar cheese. It cooked up hot in the listed time.

I was impressed by the taste of this bowl, more than I expected. The gravy adds a nice accent without being too much, and the eggs, potatoes, sausage, and cheese mix together well. The texture, as with the other bowl, is a little soft on accounting for it being frozen, but it’s still fine.

Nutritionally, the bowl has 320 calories, 23 grams of fat (29% of the recommended daily value), 9 grams of saturated fat (45%), and 630 milligrams of sodium (27%). All of these numbers, while still fairly high, are lower than the Meat Lovers bowl.

This bowl is ultra-processed in the same way the other bowl is, with many of the same additives like maltodextrin and xanthan gum. Three allergens are listed, milk, eggs, and soy.

The Verdict:

The two Breakfast Best Breakfast Bowls taste great. The texture is a little soft on accounting for being frozen, but it isn’t bad, and both of them have rich flavor that reflects the blending of the various ingredients. These are also easy to make and can be good to go in just a few minutes, and at a price competitive with other brands. I’m a little partial toward the Sausage and Gravy one, but both are good.

On the flip side, they’re also both ultra-processed and high in fat, saturated fat, and sodium, especially the Meat Lovers Bowl. That’s not at all a surprise, and it is also true of competing breakfast bowl brands like Jimmy Dean and Great Value. We’ll leave it to individual consumers to weigh the pros and cons of these bowls. If you have the time, you can make these for less money — and likely healthier — yourself … including with readily available Aldi products. If you don’t have time, though, these are an option.