Below is a brief analysis of a range of fish fingers, considering the cost of the fish finger, the type of fish and the ratio of fish to total product weight

We have selected one really expensive gourmet finger, one where quantity is everything and a number of the more common brands and supermarket's own label.

These charts are created using Personal Business Intelligence, if you want you play around yourself you will also need Costs.xlsx the data and FishFingers.dis the DIS file that PerBI needs to understand the excel data file.

The cost in pence per gram of fish.

Initially I suspected that the Cod fish fingers would be more expensive than Alaska Pollock with minced fish being the cheapest. Surprisingly Cod and Alaska Pollock seem to cost about the same.

The one Cod item which is much greater than all others is a gourmet product and slightly surprisingly the minced fish product is not the cheapest.

The lowest cost is 0.37 pence per gram and the highest is 2.77 pence per gram

The cost in pence per gram of product, that is all of the ingredients including fish.

Most products don't move when you rank then by total cost or fish cost. This is because there is a quite small variation in the percentage of fish.

The lowest cost is 0.24 pence per gram and the highest is 1.61 pence per gram.

The percentage of fish in the fish finger.

Surprisingly the percentage of fish does not seem to change very much across the examined products.

The lowest percentage is 49% fish and the highest is 70% fish.

For comparison purposes here are details of some breaded fish fillets, what might be regarded as "proper" portions of fish. The numbers are quite surprising, the fish content seems to be about the same as the fish finger but the price seems to be slightly higher.

However it is quite hard to be sure about price in the real world as both fish fingers and fish fillets tend to be on special offer a lot.

This surprised me as I was expecting the fish finger to have a lot less fish in it than the larger fish fillet.

Does this raise a question about the quality of fish in the two types of product, at this moment I am not sure?