Australian supermarket sliced cheese taste test: ‘Like eating a reconstituted swamp of plastic and milk’

I once ran a cheese club with a friend. We'd buy an absurd number of fancy cheeses, get them delivered to my house, I'd divide them into portions and the club members would collect their cheeses from my house. As almost everyone missed the communal pickup date, there would be a week and a half where my fridge was 90% cheese. Every time I opened it, it would leak an aroma so robust, my house would smell for hours afterwards.

Last week my fridge was full of supermarket sliced cheese, 4kg in all - enough to fill an entire shelf and more. When I opened my fridge I smelled nothing but the staleness of the air inside. Sliced cheese shouldn't be smelly. Its mission in life isn't to impress, it's to fit in - into a sandwich, a busy work schedule or a child's picky diet. If I'm buying sliced cheese, I'm looking for the most convenient and reliable form: tasty, inoffensive and easy to use. That was my mindset when I sourced and taste-tested 15 brands of tasty, cheddar and processed cheese slices.

Joining me in the taste test was Penny Lawson, the owner of Penny's Cheese Shop in Sydney; Tiffany Beer, the chair of judges for the Sydney Royal Cheese and Dairy Produce Show; Petra Sugiarto, a Sydney-based microbiologist and professional cheese judge; and Alex Grenouiller, the owner of Marani Deli in Sydney, which also served as the test location. In the blind taste test, we tried the cheeses straight and scored them based on taste, texture, aroma and appearance, with taste accounting for more than half of the final score. Afterwards, I also tested each cheese for meltability and ease of use (what's the point of buying sliced cheese if all the slices stick together?).

The key finding of the cheese adventure? There is little diversity in the sliced cheese market. Almost all the test products (certainly the ones that scored more than six out of 10), are perfectly suitable for a sandwich. Note, three cheeses - Mainland, Dairyworks and Hillview - were cut from the final results because our reviewers thought they were worse than other cheeses from a similar style or at a similar price point.

Bega Farmers' Tasty Natural Cheese Slices 250g, $7.50 ($3 per 100g), available at major supermarkets

Score: 7.5/10

One reviewer took a bite and said: "This is like a professional athlete, exceptional at performing its one task." Others described it as "solid", "consistent" or "balanced". It has the expected cheesy-yellow colour, is easy to peel off the stack, has a typical but mild cheddar aroma, and is savoury and milky in flavour with a bit of bite. Not the golazo-scoring Sam Kerr of cheese but no one expected that in a sliced cheese tasting. The best you can hope for is a cheesy Steph Catley, a consistent, reliable performer who would never win the Ballon d'Or but might be awarded best left-back of the season if someone noticed their 22 consecutive 7.5-out-of-10 performances.