Buying a ready-made fruit salad can seem like the ideal way to help towards your five portions a day of fruit and vegetables, but it can be a let-down if your mangoes are mushy, your grapes grotty and your apples appalling.

Fancy something fresh and juicy? How about a slice of orange and a few grapes, maybe a bit of mango and melon? Healthy snacking is getting easier, especially for summer days. The British have never been good at hot weather food, for fairly obvious reasons. But when the temperature does creep up above 75F, we usually appreciate something lighter than steak pie and chips, or a pasty and a doughnut.

Pre-prepared salads are big business now. All supermarkets and a growing number of butchers, bakers and delicatessens offer them too.

But now a number are offering fresh fruit salads too. Usually a mixture of apples, oranges, grapes and maybe a bit of something slightly more exotic. Some, like Sainsbury's, offer a salad bar where you can pick and mix your own fruit. Some, like Marks & Spencer offer a wide variety of variations on fruit salads, including melon medleys or tropical salads. Others have just cored , sliced and packed an apple to save you the bother.

Ready made fruit salads are a brilliant idea - especially when we're all being urged to eat our five portions of fruit and veg a day.

BUT fruit is delicate. The trouble is with fresh fruit is that you have no mayonnaise or dressing to hide the problems.

We found lots of crisp apples, juicy oranges, mouthwatering mangoes. But unfortunately not in the same pack.

If the apples were crisp, the kiwi fruit was soggy. If the orange was juicy, the grapes were squishy. If the melon was crunchy, the pineapple was woody. All the fruit salads we chose were well before their sell-by date but we didn't find one where every fruit was at its sparkling best.

Even the packet of apple was actually a few slices from two different apples. And yes, one was crisp and crunchy and the other was soft and soggy.

When it comes to the crunch you might be better off preparing your own salad and taking it in.

No five star salads, but here they are in order of merit.

TESCO MELON MEDLEY ****

£1.69 for 400g

Good, different types of melon - honeydew, watermelon and cantaloupe. All fresh and crunchy. Very refreshing.

SAFEWAY MELON MEDLEY****

£1.99 for 350g

Three different sorts of melon. All of them just right, but quite a bit more expensive than Tesco.

MARKS & SPENCER MELON MEDLEY ****

£2.50 for 450g

Again, three sorts of melon, very fresh, but the honeydew melon was hard.

CO-OP MELON MEDLEY ****

£1.19 for 120g

Honeydew melon, watermelon and cantaloupe. This was very good

MARKS & SPENCER FRESH TROPICAL FRUIT ***

£2.99 for 425g

Pineapple, papaya, mango and kiwi in passion fruit dressing

Exciting blend of good fresh, tangy flavours. Definitely exotic and juicy. But the kiwi fruit was unpleasantly soft and past its best.

MARKS & SPENCER FRESH FRUIT ***

£2.99 for 400g

Melon, orange, mango, apple, grape, pineapple, kiwi, watermelon

Plenty of different fruits and a good blend, but some of the apple slices were disgustingly soft.

CO-OP FRUIT SALAD IN FRESH ORANGE JUICE ***

£1.49 for 220g

Mandarins, apple, black grapes and pineapple in fresh orange juice. Nice juicy mixture. Mandarins were delicious, apples were squishy.

SAINSBURYS FRESH FRUIT SALAD ***

£2.79 for 640g

Apples, melons, orange, grapes and kiwi.

The nicest oranges we tried - really juicy and delicious, but the grapes were going brown at the ends.

BOOTS APPLE WEDGES HH

70p for 120g

This seems to be the equivalent of one apple, but the slices came from two. Half of them delicious. Half were disgusting.

SAFEWAY FRESH FRUIT SALAD **

£1.99 for 400g

With apples, orange and grapes

Very boring ordinary mixture. Apples and grapes were fine, but the oranges were a bit stringy and bitter

TESCO FRESH FRUIT SALAD *

£1.69 for 400g

Oranges, apple, pineapple and grapes.

Pineapple was woody and the apple was soft to the point of yukky squidginess. This was possibly the most unpleasant fruit salad we tried.

Your best buy is probably going to be any melon medley as they seem to stay freshest longest. But does watermelon actually taste of anything?