I Did the Math: Brownies
- Carrie
- Apr 11, 2024
- 3 min read
Updated: Apr 13, 2024
Photos left to right: grocery store bakery, Little Debbie Cosmic Brownies, Duncan Hines box mix, homemade brownies
Have you ever wondered what is the cheapest and tastiest option when it comes to brownies? I did the math and compared ready-made brownies from a grocery store bakery, a nationwide snack food chain, a box mix, and a batch of homemade. Who wins the price and taste wars? The results may surprise you!
A little bit of background on the taste-testers: two teens under 20 and two 50-something adults. We are double blindfolded and measuring taste, smell, and texture. The brownies are round because the bakery brownies came that way and I wanted to keep them as equal to one another as possible for unbiased testing.
THE RESULTS
PRICE: Box mix brownies, coming in at 13¢ per ounce.
TASTE: Box mix brownies.
SMELL: Box mix brownies slightly edged out the competition with two of us voting for this aroma, but the other two on our panel chose the more artificial flavors from the Little Debbie brownies and pre-packaged bakery brownies as having the most pleasing chocolatey smell.
TEXTURE: Homemade brownies were the winner here offering up a slightly more crunchy exterior and moist interior the other brownies could not produce, most likely from the use of butter instead of oil.
OVERALL WINNER: Box mix brownies were ranked the best brownies in our household. Though slightly on the more oily side, these brownies gave off solid chocolate smells, rich chocolate taste, and a moist, fudgy chew our family associates most with brownies.
BIGGEST LOSER: Little Debbie Cosmic Brownies. We only had one panelist rank these above the lowest score possible, and that was for smell. These sugar bombs were sickly sweet and lacked a rich chocolate taste. They were pasty, chalky, and not pleasant to chew through.
THE MATH
BROWNIE TYPE | COST BREAKDOWN* | TOTAL COST | PRICE PER OUNCE |
Little Debbie Cosmic Brownies |
| $2.79 | $2.79/13.1oz=21¢ per oz |
Bakery Brownies | $4.99 | $4.99/11.9oz=42¢ per oz | |
Duncan Hines 13x9 Chewy Fudge Brownie box mix |
| $3.41 | $3.41/26.55=13¢ per oz |
Homemade Brownies |
| $5.83 | $5.83/22.15=26¢ per oz |
*All ingredients priced out 3/10/24 from Kroger grocery stores in CO.
HIDDEN COSTS
For the Duncan Hines box mix, if you didn't already have eggs or oil, you would be adding an additional $7.18 to your cart for a grand total of $9.67.
For the homemade brownies, if you didn't have any of the ingredients on hand and had to buy everything, your grand total would be $21.43.
Other items to consider: cost of baking pan (metal or disposable aluminum baking tray) and parchment paper or cooking spray, such as Pam, to keep brownies from sticking.
FINAL THOUGHTS
A huge caveat to these test results: we are a box brownie mix household, so that is our unintentional, biased baseline regardless of how blind or fair the testing was. This became evident to me after polling two people in our household. We are unintentionally biased towards box mix brownies simply because this is what we've come to recognize "how brownies should taste" throughout the years. I would love to see what the results would be from a family who eats nothing but homemade brownies, or pit several box mixes against each other, but that feels like a separate blog post for another time. I think the biggest takeaway here is that it's totally okay to rely on pre-packaged, convenience foods if you like the taste—especially if you can't replicate it with a homemade product. This taste test has definitely put me on the hunt for a better homemade brownie recipe, but my family feels pretty conditioned to like the box mixes, so I'll have to keep you posted! What side are you taking in the brownie wars? Let me know in the comments below.
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