44% Of Shoppers Agree This Is The Best Brand Of Mayonnaise
Mayonnaise may be the most basic of condiments, and yet it's actually surprisingly complex if you take into consideration how it's made. As anyone who's ever tried making their own mayo at home can attest, it's no easy task getting oil and egg yolks to emulsify. Still, homemade mayo – or at least the kind made in-house at a restaurant – is something everyone should try at least once. It really is to the store-bought stuff like, well, boeuf bourguignon is to Dinty Moore.
For most of our mayonnaise needs, though, the store-bought stuff does a perfectly adequate job of binding a tuna salad or moisturizing a sandwich, even if it's not necessarily the kind of stuff you'll want to dip your fries in as they do in Europe. Still, mayo is pretty much mayo, though. Is there really all that much difference between the cheapest store brand and the priciest of name brands? Well, maybe so, maybe no. Mashed recently polled 657 mayo users in the United States to ask them to pick a favorite among the following seven brands: Duke's, Heinz, Hellman's, Kewpie, Kraft, Miracle Whip, and Trader Joe's, with this last option being the closest thing to a generic mayo on our list. Among these big-name brands, there was one clear winner that swept nearly half of the votes, so clearly people do have opinions about what makes one brand of mayonnaise different from another nearly-identical jar of the white stuff.
This century-old mayo was our blue-ribbon winner
Our poll results may well have reflected people's familiarity or lack thereof with the products offered in a field dominated by just a handful of brands. Cult favorite Japanese Kewpie came in last with just under 3% of the vote. Trader Joe's, a label with its own cult following (the store, not specifically the mayo), didn't quite hit the 4% mark. Duke's, a regional favorite, may not have much of a fan base outside the South, as it received fewer than 8% of the votes. Coming in the middle of the pack were 3 big names: Heinz, with an approval rating over 11%, Kraft, almost making it to 14%, and Miracle Whip, the favorite "mayo" of over 17% of the people we polled. Despite this last-named brand not actually being mayonnaise at all (its own label calls it "salad dressing"), it was still our second-place vote-getter.
Standing way out ahead of the pack, however, was the one brand of mayonnaise that's familiar to nearly everyone: Hellmann's. Fully 44% of our poll respondents seemed to feel that when they bought this blue-ribbon mayo, they really were bringing home the best their grocery store shelves had to offer. After all, any brand that's been around for 100 years has to be doing something right!