Starbucks Snacking Cheese

Starbucks Snacking Cheese costs £3.50 and carries 134 calories with 11g of protein and no carbohydrate at all. Portioned cheese, sold chilled.

It is the only item on the entire Starbucks UK menu with 0g of carbohydrate and 0g of sugar. For anyone eating low carb, keto or simply avoiding sugar, there is nothing else on the board that qualifies, and the 11g of protein for 134 calories is the best ratio of any snack here by a wide margin.

7g of saturated fat is the trade and it is 35 percent of an adult daily reference intake in a small pack. Cheese concentrates milk fat by design, so the figure is inherent rather than a formulation choice, and it is high relative to the calorie count precisely because there is no carbohydrate diluting it.

Against the rest of the category the contrast is sharp. The lightly salted Kettle Chips carry 206 calories and 2.3g of protein; this carries 134 and 11g. Salt at 0.38g is also lower than most of the crisp bags despite cheese being a salty food.

The practical weakness is price. At £3.50 it is the most expensive snack in the category, more than double the crisps and nearly three times the chocolate coin, which is a lot for a small pack of cheese whatever its nutritional case.

Chilled storage is the practical constraint and the reason this sits with the sandwiches rather than on the snack shelf. It cannot be left in a bag for an afternoon the way crisps or a biscuit packet can, which limits it to being eaten fairly soon after buying.

It carries a vegetarian label, which is worth noting since many hard cheeses use animal rennet and cannot. Milk is the only declared allergen. Prices reach £4.85 on delivery.