20% Think This Brand Has The Worst Frozen Fish Sticks
Frozen food staples vary greatly from household to household, but a few popular items stand out as particularly iconic denizens of the modern icebox. You have your Ore-Ida crinkle fries (these double as ice packs), your peas and carrots (these also double as ice packs), your frozen desserts, and your fish sticks, sometimes known as fish fingers. As people continue to sing the paeans to frozen food that linger from early-pandemic dining trends, frozen fish sticks are as hot as ever. They provide quick bites of protein and carbohydrates in cute little shapes, which make them a treasured dinner or mid-day snack option for tiny humans known as children.
While fish sticks are certainly not immune to the global inflation crisis, they're still enjoying plenty of real estate in shoppers' grocery carts. Plus, the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) recently launched a big campaign to make the food item healthier by sending over $5 billion each to two seafood brands to encourage them to use Alaska pollock in their fish sticks (via IntraFish).
As you'd expect, some brands are more popular than others. In fact, as found in a Mashed poll, one brand is undoubtedly the least beloved.
People are passing on Van de Kamp
In a Mashed poll composed of 549 U.S. respondents, 20% said Van de Camp made the worst frozen fish sticks on the market. This contradicts the respondents of a 2021 poll, who said the brand made the second-best frozen fish (albeit, not fish sticks specifically). Van de Camp's website shows that its sticks are made with "minced fish." Perhaps our readers prefer a flakier bite.
Moving down the list, readers voted Starfish as the second-worst brand and 365 Whole Foods as the third-worst, followed by Trident Seafoods, Gorton's and Paul's (which were tied as the fifth-worst by 12.57%), and Trader Joe's, whose fish sticks took the gold as the least-bad option at 8.38%. Trident is one of the recipients of the aforementioned USDA pollock campaign, per IntraFish, so we wouldn't be surprised to see it move up the list in the coming months. We are, however, surprised to see that fish sticks may be one of the worst 365 products you can buy at Whole Foods.
Ultimately, while fish sticks are perhaps not a fish dish you'll want to make every day, you can now shop for them smarter.