IT is, of course, the most important meal of the day - which is why most of us ignore it. Long gone are the days when most families started the day sitting down round the table together for something cooked and nutritious. A bacon sandwich is too time-consuming for most and a bowl of cereal a luxury.

Even cereal's got instant. You can buy most of your favourite cereals in a bar now, easy to eat in the car or bus on the way to work. And now Kelloggs has launched Twinpots "for Breakfast on the Move". Gosh, it would give your granny indigestion just to think about it.

Breakfast like a king, lunch like a lord and sup like a peasant, goes the old saying that tries to persuade us to eat less as the day goes on. But a truly royal breakfast is pretty much a thing of the past for most of us.

Research from the US shows that people now spend an average of just 17 minutes a day preparing food at home - compared to three and a half hours, 20 years ago.

No wonder breakfast is being replaced by something known, horribly, as "deskfast".

The compromise is breakfast already in a pack. You might have to cook it, but at least you don't have to think about it. These range from packs of bacon and sausage, all of which have to be cooked separately, to complete packs that you just pop in the microwave. You can get breakfast in a pack, breakfast in a tin, breakfast in a bun. But do they make you feel like royalty?

INSTANT BREAKFASTS (Ready cooked or microwaveable)

ASDA ALL DAY BREAKFAST (frozen) £1.88

Baked beans, hash browns, omelette, sausage, two rashers smoked back bacon, mushrooms. Baked beans, mushroom, bacon and hash browns - fine. Sausage - average, just. Omelette - odd.

This is one you can microwave, which gave it a distinct advantage for our teenage testers. But we still haven't worked out why, according to the ingredients, the mushrooms should need an "anti-foaming agent".

BIG AL'S EXPRESS ALL DAY BREAKFAST BAGUETTE (frozen) £1.49

Sausage, bacon and tomato ketchup in a baguette, all miicrowavable in under three minutes. There is twice as much tomato ketchup (16per cent) as bacon (eight per cent) - which should tell you all you need to know. However, the bread, which had 22 listed ingredients, microwaves quite well and our testers thought as you could deal with it without having to think, that it was probably a painless way to cope with a hangover.

GREGGS ALL DAY BREAKFAST (fresh)

£1.65

This is an egg mayonnaise roll with tomato, sausage, tomato relish and bacon. Its great advantage is that it was freshly made. Bit too much mayo, we're talking breakfast after all, but quite decent.

HEINZ ALL DAY BREAKFAST (frozen) 340g for £1.39

Sausages, bacon, mushrooms, baked beans, hash brown. Sausages, mushrooms and beans were OK, tiddly bit of bacon was too small to taste. "Crispy" hash brown was soggy. This might have been because we microwaved it which they say is possible, but recommend conventional cooking. Problem with that is that even in the microwave it took 15 minutes. In an ordinary oven it takes 45 minutes. Frankly, it's not worth the wait.

HP ALL DAY BREAKFAST (canned) 95p for 415g

For something out of a can, this looked almost appealing - proper sausages, mushrooms, bits of bacon, baked beans and some anonymous nuggety things that turned out to be sort of egg. Our testers enjoyed it. Then we read that the sausages contained mechanically recovered chicken and we weren't so keen.

KELLOGGS TO GO TWINPOTS 79p-99p

A reasonable size bowl of cornflakes, Frosties, Special K or Branflakes in one side. In the other a small tub of long life milk. Add a sachet of sugar and a plastic spoon and yes, you have breakfast on the move.

The publicity for these said they would be suitable for breakfasting while on the train or driving to work. How you're supposed to pour the milk, open the sugar and slurp your cereal while driving along...

But, having said that, these were quite popular with our testers. The long life milk was amazingly, quite acceptable, and even when they hadn't been chilled, the whole thing tasted quite good. There are times when cereal is the only snack that will do and this neatly packaged version might be just the thing.

But not, perhaps, while you're driving....

SAFEWAY ALL DAY BREAKFAST (frozen) £1.99 for 400g

Baked beans (lots) with hash browns, omelette , back bacon and mushrooms.

The omelette was rubbery, the hash browns soggy, the bacon was titchy but the beans and sausages were all right.

GET COOKING...

CO-OP Scottish style breakfast pack (fresh) 680g for £2.09

Four thin pork sausages, four thin beef sausages, four slices of sausage, four slices black pudding.

Not exactly what you would call a well balanced breakfast. No beans, tomatoes, mushrooms and possibly explains a lot about the Scots. But what there was, was decent enough and you could always buy your own tomatoes.

MORRISSONS BREAKFAST PACK (fresh)

£1.99

Six rashers of British rindless back bacon, four thick pork sausages, four hash browns.

Good standard stuff that needed a little extra with it, maybe a small pot of baked beans stuck in the corner?

NB Teenagers doing exams really do NEED breakfast. Seriously. Research has shown that students who had a proper meal at the start of the day performed notably better in exams. So, just ignore their excuses and get them fed. Tell them it's worth half a grade.