Lunch Mate Deli Style Rotisserie Seasoned Chicken Breast

I like to keep lunch simple.

Some of it is a matter of time. Time to prepare, but also time to eat. In my day work, I may only have a few minutes for lunch, so I don’t necessarily have the luxury of something that requires a lot of assembly. Sandwiches, I have learned, are simple on both ends: I can assemble a sandwich in a few minutes, and I can eat one almost as quickly.

My default sandwich is peanut butter and honey or perhaps a traditional peanut butter and jelly. If we happen to have lunch meat around the house, I might also go with a lunch meat sandwich with cheese and mayo.

For that reason, I keep an eye out for lunch meats when I’m at Aldi: ham, turkey, that kind of thing. And chicken. Like this one.

Lunch Mate Deli Style Rotisserie Seasoned Chicken Breast is an everyday Regular Buy. That means you can find at Aldi all the time. It’s one of a number of different Aldi lunch meat options that you can find in the refrigerated section. This particular version comes in a 9-ounce clamshell package and currently costs $3.45, or around 38 cents an ounce.

The clamshell is not my favorite — I prefer Ziploc-style bags, personally — but I still like it better than the cheese packages Aldi sells. This meat package reseals pretty well and isn’t too hard to use.

Nutritionally, each serving of chicken has 70 calories, 1 gram of fat, 3 grams of carbs, and 340 milligrams of sodium. All of those are pretty low save maybe the sodium, and even that is relatively modest. You would hope that chicken wouldn’t be too high in things like fat, and that is the case here.

This isn’t the Aldi Simply Nature house brand, so one might expect some additives in the mix, especially from a chicken that is seasoned. There are additives. Chicken breast is the main ingredient, and other ingredients include modified food starch, dextrose, maltodextrin, natural flavors, and seasonings like salt, dry vinegar, black pepper, and dehydrated onion. The ingredients don’t list any allergens.

From a taste vantage point, this chicken is a personal favorite. I really like this chicken’s seasoned flavor, which is, in my view, almost good enough to have without anything else on it. It’s flavorful without being too salty and goes nicely on a sandwich with cheese. It’s also thinly sliced, giving it a good deli-like texture.

The Verdict:

I’m a fan of this Lunch Mate Deli Style Rotisserie Seasoned Chicken Breast, which has a great taste and a nice deli texture. It also is low in fat and modest in sodium. If you prefer your chicken with fewer additives, you might look at one of Aldi’s Simply Nature lunch meats — at post time chicken isn’t one of them — but beyond that this is a tasty and reasonably healthy lunch meat.