Stouffer’s Cheddar Potato Bake Review

Before we begin this review for Stouffer’s Cheddar Potato Bake, there’s something we need to get off our chest. Look at the front of the box pictured above. In bold font, the package boasts of only having 250 calories. But if you look closer, you’ll see a little disclaimer that says, “Per 1/2 package.”

We find this kind of marketing to be extremely sleazy. This isn’t a very big meal — it’s smaller than many of the other Stouffer’s meals we’ve tried — and there’s no real way to separate this into portions, like there would be in, say, a package of individually wrapped pizzas. This is clearly intended to be one portion, and to market it as two — just to lower the advertised calorie count — is dishonest. This isn’t one of Stouffer’s family-sized meals; this is a single-serve meal.

Yes, we’ve seen several instances before where a single meal was listed as two servings in the Nutrition Facts section of the box, but here it’s advertised as a selling point of the meal — and it’s blatantly not true. Yes, there’s a disclaimer, but the part of the box designed to grab your attention is the big 250 in the lower left corner. It’s quite possible you would pick this up at the grocery store and not even realize it actually has 500 calories until you got it home.

To Stouffer’s, we have this to say: Stop being straight-up dishonest on your packaging. We’re keeping our eyes on you and we’ll keep calling you out on your deception. To our readers: Be careful. This kind of thing is pretty common in the shadier underbelly of the frozen food industry. If you want this practice to end, vote with your wallet and refuse to reward these manipulative tactics.

So, now that we’ve burned some calories on that heated rant, we can afford to eat this high-calorie meal. Let’s move on with the review.

This dish may be small, but it takes six whole minutes to heat up in the microwave. That’s a pretty hefty cook time for a frozen meal, especially one that’s not meat-centric.

But there is some meat here — it’s a sprinkling of bacon. Perhaps we shouldn’t understate the bacon content here, since it’s the first thing you’ll smell when you pull this out of the microwave. So while it may not be plentiful, its presence is certainly not discreet, at least as far as small is concerned. Once we started digging into this dish, the bacon pieces were actually quite hard to find. We could definitely smell them, but they were very hard to see. We think a lot of it ends up hiding in the breadcrumbs.

But you’re probably not here for the bacon; we’re guessing you’re here for the Russet potatoes. Well, unfortunately those aren’t great. They make up a huge portion of this dish, but they don’t really have a lot of flavor and they seem a little dry in the center, even though they’re soaked in cheese sauce. The smaller pieces actually come out better than the larger ones, as they tend to actually feel moist and soft all the way through. Of course, the potatoes do make this dish pretty filling, even though it’s about two thirds the size of a lot of other Stouffer’s meals we’ve tried.

The lack of flavor in the potatoes means the cheddar cheese sauce does all the talking. And it does taste pretty good. We have no complaints about the sauce. Plus, there’s a generous portion of breadcrumbs to give the whole thing a nice crunch.

Stouffer’s Cheddar Potato Bake comes packaged in a box full of lies. It’s a mediocre potato bake pretending to be a low-calorie dish when it’s clearly not. Stouffer’s, we’re pretty disappointed.

If you want to learn more about the nutrition info or ingredients in this frozen potato bake, check out our package scans below.