I’ve had a lot of people contact me to ask if Jack’s is trading off my name, as someone who is reasonably well known for doing budget recipes and budget food, but I’ve been assured it was named after Tesco’s founder, Jack Cohen. I’ve tentatively reached out to see if it’s open to doing partnership work – but first, we’d need to have a serious chat about the abomination that it is trying to pass off as cheese.

It’s impossible to get cheese wrong, surely? Cheese is one of the world’s great foodstuffs and I speak as someone who would once happily snarf a packet of American-style cheese singles in front of the telly on my own. And yet, somehow, this from Jack’s is absolutely awful – rank and stinking; I ended a three-year cheese hiatus for this and came away feeling dirty and disappointed.

If it wants to take over the Aldi/Lidl market, it needs to up its game because people have come to expect a certain quality from budget foods. Aldi and Lidl, and even the value ranges at the supermarket, have set a standard that newcomers have to achieve or exceed.

Sadly, I’m not seeing it with Jack’s at the moment.

I don’t know who its suppliers are; it boasts that 80% of them are British. Frankly, if this is the food we are to expect in the post-Brexit culinary apocalypse, I might actually apply for my Cypriot passport.

There’s always going to be stuff it does really well and stuff it doesn’t do so brilliantly. But if it’s serious about doing quality stuff on a budget, it needs to go back along its supply chain and ask at what point this is going wrong. Who’s tasting this? Why does it feel that “cut price” has to mean shoddy quality, when the other brands seem to appreciate their less well-off customers are human beings with actual taste buds?

I tend to tell my readers to go for the cheapest ingredients every time, unless they’re unbearable. If so, you only need to have them once and the next week switch up. It works for ingredients that are going into meals, such as tinned tomatoes, stock cubes, value-range veg, but standalone products such as teabags, jam and peanut butter have nowhere to hide. They need to be good enough just as they are.

It will be interesting to see whether Jack’s is pricing itself to be like small corner shops or pitching itself at Tesco Value customers. Only two have opened so far, so it’s a hard experiment to measure and perhaps I’m being a little hard. I hear it’s opening another 15 this year, which isn’t so much a bang into the cut-price market as a whimper into failing Express stores.

It’s certainly not going to do Tesco any harm to add to its portfolio with a couple of gimmicks, but whether it’s a long-term venture, well, as someone who eyes the budget food market with the zeal of a retired trainspotter, I remain sceptical.

I lived for a year on cold tomato soup, baked beans and 70p macaroni cheese, and even I think this is crap. Sorry, Jack’s, but it’s a no from me.