Which British sausage roll is the best?? Let’s try them all!

I expected the Sainsbury’s sausage roll to be the worst one I tried. It came from a hot shelf in a supermarket, and I’d picked it as a starting point before moving on to the supposedly fancier options. By the time I reached Greggs, I was thinking about going back to Sainsbury’s.

I wanted to compare cheap and more expensive sausage rolls around Canterbury, with one fairly simple aim. I wanted a hot sausage roll I could buy and eat straight away. I published this taste test in October 2025, so the prices and availability describe that outing rather than what you might find now. The rain arrived during the first stop. I kept going.

Watch my Canterbury sausage roll taste test on YouTube.

Sainsbury’s surprised me

The Sainsbury’s roll cost £1.60 and was piping hot when I bought it. It was available as the side in a meal deal, which I thought was a nice option. I found a picnic bench by the river and sat down to try it, just as it started raining.

There was a decent amount of filling, and it tasted good. The pastry was still flaky despite coming from the hot shelf. I’d expected something grim, so having a hot roll with flavoured filling and proper flakes was a pleasant surprise.

At that point I hadn’t tasted anything else, so I couldn’t make a comparison yet. But it did the job I’d set out to test. I could buy one, take it away and eat it hot. There were pastry flakes all over my face, naturally.

M&S was good, but cold

I went to the M&S cafe first, expecting to find a sausage roll there. There weren’t any. The Canterbury food hall had a bakery section, but I didn’t find a hot sausage roll there either, so I bought a pack of two cold M&S Collection handcrafted classic pork sausage rolls.

The pack cost £3.25. Dividing that between two made each roll very close to the Sainsbury’s price, although I had wanted one hot roll rather than two cold ones.

The filling was really good. I thought it tasted like high-quality ingredients, and the sausage roll itself was delicious. The problem was the temperature. It wasn’t what I’d come out to find.

I was pretty sure I’d had these at Christmas and liked them heated with English mustard. I planned to take the other one home and put it in the air fryer. That didn’t change the comparison in front of me, though. I was eating a cold sausage roll when I wanted a hot one to go.

Cornish Bakery was my favourite for taste

Cornish Bakery charged £3.10 for one sausage roll, the highest price per roll that day. It was warm, looked lovely, and the first bite gave me properly flaky pastry and nicely flavoured sausage meat.

I liked it more than the Sainsbury’s one. It was savoury, meaty and filling, with plenty of sausage inside. Sitting there with that roll, even with the rain and wind, made me very grateful to live in England.

The price still mattered. I didn’t want to spend £3.10 every time I had a sausage roll, and this cost nearly twice as much as Sainsbury’s. Sometimes I’d want something fancier. Sometimes a supermarket roll would be exactly what I was after.

Greggs didn’t win the comparison

Greggs was the cheapest at £1.30. It was ready to go, and the service was straightforward. The roll looked skinnier than I remembered, and smaller than the Sainsbury’s one, although size alone didn’t make one better.

It tasted good, but greasier than the others. Even holding it, I noticed that the pastry felt wetter. I also thought it had less filling, and the meat wasn’t as flavoured as the Sainsbury’s filling.

I still understood the appeal. Greggs felt familiar and consistent. But between those two cheaper options, I preferred Sainsbury’s. It felt more substantial, less greasy and better seasoned, which was the opposite of what I’d expected at the start.

Ignoring price, Cornish Bakery was my favourite of the four. Sausage rolls are more of a treat for me, so I’d rather have that one less often and enjoy it. For a cheaper hot roll from this particular outing, Sainsbury’s was the surprise.