Cheese Club Macaroni and Cheese Dinner

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Macaroni and cheese is a dish that’s hundreds of years old, tracing its origins back to Italy and England. This baked dish eventually spread to other parts of Europe before catching the attention of Thomas Jefferson, who was introduced to the dish through James Hemings, one of his slaves, who was a trained chef.

In the 1930s, in the midst of the Great Depression, a salesman in St. Louis, Missouri got the idea to sell packages of macaroni together with grated cheese. By 1937, businessman James Lewis Kraft — yes, that Kraft — took up the idea and sold it in boxes. Thanks to a combination of factors, including the looming war in Europe, the product took off. It wasn’t nonperishable, but the fact that it could be stored at room temperature for several months made it appealing to consumers without refrigerators, especially up in Canada.

Today, the blue box of macaroni noodles and a packet of powdered cheese remains a staple on grocery shelves: it’s cheap, it’s easy, and it’s familiar.

Aldi has never found a brand it didn’t try to imitate, and so here we have the Aldi take on Kraft mac and cheese. We picked up a box and cooked it up for our review.

Cheese Club Macaroni and Cheese Dinner is an Aldi Regular Buy. You can find it in stores all the time. It’s been a fixture on Aldi shelves for years. The external box hasn’t changed much at all during that time — it still comes in a box that looks suspiciously like Kraft, right down to some of the fonts. It lasts for a while but not forever, so be mindful of the best-by date on the top of the box.

The Aldi mac weighs in at 7.25 ounces and costs 57 cents a box, or about 7.9 cents an ounce. For comparison, Walmart’s Great Value mac is virtually identical in price, while Kraft mac is more than twice the price at 17.1 cents an ounce. This is as inexpensive as it gets.

This food is, by definition, ultra-processed, with some ingredients that you wouldn’t exactly find in your pantry. The lead ingredient is enriched wheat pasta, followed by the likes of whey, maltodextrin, soybean oil, silicon dioxide (to reduce caking), sodium phosphate, citric acid, cheddar cheese, “natural flavors,” dehydrated cream, and sodium caseinate. The package lists two allergens, wheat and milk.

To be fair, though, most boxed mac like this is similarly ultra-processed. That includes Kraft.

Fully prepared, each 1-cup serving (there are three servings per box) contains 390 calories, 17 grams of fat (22% of your recommended daily value), 10 grams of saturated fat (50%), 640 milligrams of sodium (20%), and 51 grams of carbohydrates (19%). Those numbers assume you’re adding 2% milk; it’s not clear if they also assume margarine or butter or both.

You’ll need the following to cook this mac:

• A medium-sized saucepan
• 6 cups of water
• 1/4 cup of milk — the box says 2% but we typically use whole
• 1/4 cup of margarine or butter — we think butter tastes the best, but you can also substitute spread

This cooks up pretty much like Kraft does. First, bring the 6 cups of water to a boil in the saucepan. Next, stir in the pasta. Boil for 7-10 minutes to desired tenderness, stirring occasionally. (The stirring helps it cook and keeps it from sticking to the bottom of the saucepan.) Then, drain the water but do not rinse the pasta. Return the pasta to the pot, then add the milk, margarine / butter / spread, and the contents of the powder (sauce) packet. Mix well until it is smooth and creamy.

Note: if you use regular butter, it can take a little longer to stir it in.

Aldi has tweaked this formula over the years, and we think it’s largely for the better. For a long time, we thought there was a huge gap between Aldi and Kraft, but we think that gap is much smaller now. The Kraft mac still enjoys a bit of a lead on texture — the Aldi sauce is less thick and a little more watery — but the tastes are far closer than they used to be. There was a time when our testers were firmly in camp Kraft, but today they are fine with either, and that’s saying something.

The Verdict:

From a quality perspective, Cheese Club Macaroni and Cheese Dinner stands up surprisingly well to Kraft mac and cheese. In our view, it tastes more similar than it did years ago and the texture is similar, if not exact, thanks to a sauce that can be a little thinner once prepared. Most boxed mac is ultra-processed and high in the likes of fat, sodium, and carbs, and this is no exception.

Still, if you need boxed macaroni and cheese, this is as cheap as it gets — half the price of Kraft — and for that reason it is worth a try if you need it in your pantry.