Apple crumble sandwiches, panettone rolls… Get ready for the ‘dessertwich’

Have you ever looked at an apple crumble and decided its chief failing is that it isn’t wedged between two slices of bread? Someone at Sainsbury’s has.

From 30 November, you can indulge in the supermarket’s latest contribution to the unhinged Christmas food arms race: an apple crumble sandwich for £1.85. That’ll get you brioche filled with fresh apple slices, compote, creme fraiche, soft cheese, salted caramel and granola crumble.

Perhaps someone in R&D accidentally dropped a pudding into a bread bin and decided to sell the evidence.

I don’t recall anyone crying out for more “dessertwiches”. Apple crumble was doing perfectly well on its own. It had a good run – apple pie became crumble during Second World War food rationing – and generally was enjoyable without an intervention from a sandwich development team.

Yet here we are. Approaching Christmas 2026, Britain’s supermarkets are once again engaged in the increasingly bizarre competition to see what can be shoved between two slices of bread and called a festive sandwich. Pudding is the latest casualty.

Grab-and-go lunches used to be a fairly straightforward proposition at this time of year. Turkey, stuffing, cranberry sauce, brie if you were feeling fancy, perhaps bacon for seemingly no thematic reason at all.

Apparently, merely putting Christmas dinner in a sandwich now lacks imagination. The entire festive season must be wrapped up in a single packet, ideally with a little extra something that makes people stop in the supermarket aisle and go, “Sorry, what?”

You might have the same reaction in Tesco, which is putting turkey pastrami, Emmental cheese and pickled red slaw inside a panettone roll. Once a festive sweet bread, now working shifts on the deli counter. I dread to think what the Italians make of this.

Perhaps we should have seen this coming. Last summer, Marks & Spencer launched a strawberries and cream sandwich, inspired by the Japanese fruit sando in soft milk bread. In Japan, it’s an established treat and often an elegant thing. In Britain, it looks more like a collective cry for help. “Collective” being the operative word. More than a million were sold.

More recently, Tesco launched a birthday cake sandwich to celebrate 30 years of Clubcard, complete with strawberry jam, cream cheese filling, vanilla frosting and rainbow sprinkles. Candle not included. Some people suggested it should be a criminal offence. Others… well, it sold out in the 1,000 stores that stocked it.

This, presumably, was when developers in supermarket headquarters up and down the country began rubbing their hands together. Why stop at strawberries? Why stop at cake? Imagine what else people might mindlessly eat during their lunch break. A spotted dick sub? A profiterole panini? Bread-and-butter pudding, served between bread and butter? Actually, that one sounds quite good.

Sainsbury’s, at least, has form. Last Christmas it sold a mince pie wrap. Admittedly, the mince pie’s principal selling point of being a small, manageable pastry was comprehensively removed. Instead, it was mincemeat compote, creme fraiche, caramel sauce and shortcake biscuit balls rolled up in a brioche-style tortilla.

Maybe we’re being too harsh. Last year, English Heritage warned that the great British pud was on the decline, so supermarkets turning them into sandwiches could be seen as an act of preservation. I doubt it’ll catch Unesco’s attention, though.

Elsewhere, the festive sandwich arms race is becoming harder to follow. Morrisons has produced something it’s calling a “three-course sandwich”: prawn cocktail starter, chicken and stuffing main, Wensleydale and Cheddar cheeseboard to finish. It certainly makes a boring desk lunch a little less boring. And you could always pop to Sainsbury’s for an apple crumble sandwich afterwards if you’re of the opinion that cheese doesn’t constitute dessert. (It does.)

PAUL, meanwhile, is doing a brie baguette with sliced pear, walnuts and mince pie chutney, in cranberry, sage and onion-flavoured bread. Cheese and fruit is hardly a crime against gastronomy but mince pie chutney? At what point does ordinary chutney become insufficiently Christmassy? Must everything taste as though it has been scraped off a Boxing Day buffet?

Admittedly, there’s a certain pleasure in all this nonsense. Christmas has always been an exercise in excess and its sandwiches are no different. Nobody is suggesting that a turkey and stuffing baguette is subject to the same rules as haute cuisine. Some of the combos might even be good – sweet and savoury certainly work well together – though don’t expect a taste test from me.

But there is something deeply peculiar about the determination to turn one food into another food. We have cakes. We have sandwiches. One does not become more interesting, nor more enjoyable, when it is turned into the other. Nor does every Christmas flavour need to be reunited with every other Christmas flavour. Why can’t we just celebrate the best bits? Give me a pigs-in-blankets sandwich. Wrap something in a Yorkshire pudding. Crumble bits of roast potato into it. Provide a gravy dipping sauce. Wait… maybe there’s a career in this.

Still, the supermarkets have worked out something important. Essentially: Christmas shoppers will always fall for it.

This year, it’s an apple crumble sandwich. By next Christmas, it could be a trifle toastie, a Christmas pudding ciabatta or a brandy butter bagel. Somewhere, a product developer is already looking at a yule log and wondering whether it would look good wrapped up in a tortilla.

It probably will. And we’ll probably buy it.