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When I plan special family dinners or holiday meals, my family has a few favorites. I often served baked ham and cheese sliders made with Hawaiian rolls, along with deviled eggs, homemade macaroni and cheese, Rich & Charlie’s Salad or a salad bar, and chilled shrimp with cocktail sauce for dipping.
When it comes to shrimp and cocktail sauce, sometimes Aldi sometimes sells shrimp rings that come with their own little cup of cocktail sauce. However, most of the time I get a better deal by simply buying a bag of frozen shrimp and a bottle of cocktail sauce, all from Aldi. My family likes Aldi shrimp, and we also find Aldi cocktail sauce to be just fine. Here, I’m taking a look at the cocktail sauce Aldi sells.
Burman’s Cocktail Sauce is a Regular Buy, so you ought to be able to find it at Aldi all year. You’ll find it on the room-temperature shelves among the other condiments and salad dressings. It should be refrigerated after opening.
It cost $0.79 for a 12-ounce bottle, or about 7 cents per ounce, at my local store at the time of publication.
For comparison, a 12-ounce bottle of Great Value Cocktail Sauce cost $1.72 or about 14 cents per ounce at Walmart at the time of writing. An 8-ounce jar of McCormick Cocktail Sauce cost $3.04 or about 38 cents per ounce at Walmart at the time of writing. That makes the Aldi sauce look like a pretty good deal.
Nutrition information and ingredients. (Click to enlarge.)
The Aldi cocktail sauce is gluten free and kosher certified.
Ingredients are tomato puree (water, tomato paste), high fructose corn syrup, distilled white vinegar, horseradish, salt, soybean oil, dehydrated onion, natural flavor, onion powder, and garlic powder.
I wasn’t excited to see high fructose corn syrup among the ingredients, but it’s also included in a lot of other popular cocktail sauce brands, including Great Value and McCormick cited above. It has a fair amount of added sugar due to the high fructose corn syrup. This also has some sodium.
One bottle of Aldi cocktail sauce contains about five 1/4-cup servings. A 1/4-cup serving has 70 calories, no fat, 590 mg of sodium (25% DV), 17 grams of total carbohydrates (6% DV), 1 gram of dietary fiber (4% DV), 14 grams of total sugars, 12 grams of added sugars (25% DV), and 1 gram of protein.
Ready to serve.
So how does the Aldi sauce compare to name brands? I picked up a jar of McCormick Cocktail Sauce for Seafood from my local regular grocery store so we could try both brands side by side. A few things I noticed when glancing at the labels is that the Aldi cocktail sauce has less sodium than McCormick by almost half, so keep that in mind if you’re on a low-sodium diet. The Aldi sauce also has 2 fewer grams of added sugars.
In terms of taste, we like the Aldi sauce. It’s zesty, with that classic mild horseradish bite. It’s fairly thick and coats shrimp well when you dip them, although it’s not quick as thick as McCormick cocktail sauce. I think the Aldi sauce is a bit more flavorful than name-brand McCormick cocktail sauce, and I’ll continue to buy the Aldi version.
The Verdict:
Burman’s Cocktail Sauce is as good or better than name brands and costs a lot less. If you want inexpensive cocktail sauce to serve with chilled shrimp, this is a good choice.
