This Birds Eye Frozen Meal Is Easily A Skip In Our Mind

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"Uh oh, dinnertime already?" is the sneak-attack realization that busy home cooks know well. With a little proactive planning, busy foodies can turn to a well-stocked freezer for a healthy, well-rounded dinner in a pinch. Birds Eye may be one of the most well-known frozen vegetable brands, but perhaps less well-known is the brand's convenience-centric line of Voila! Skillet Meals. To determine which flavors are worth stocking up on, Tasting Table taste-tested nine flavors — and in our ranking of nine Birds Eye frozen meals, the Voila! Garlic Shrimp landed in last place.

By our count, this frozen seafood meal should have been named garlic "skimp." The promised garlic and shrimp components were nowhere to be found. The meal was a fairly depressing combination of very few, ultra-small shrimps, pasta, carrots, corn, and broccoli (mostly stems, not florets). As we mentioned in our review, after skillet-cooking the bag's contents for the recommended 15 to 18 minutes, "the few, pre-cooked, popcorn-sized shrimp became severely overcooked, tough, and inedible." That unpleasant texture was made even worse by the fact that there was hardly any sauce in the bag, and what sauce there was had "little garlic flavor and zero creamy, richness" (pass). 

On the official brand website, consumer reviews of Bird Eye's Voila! Garlic Shrimp sound off, "Disappointing! [...] I couldn't taste any garlic and there were only 10 popcorn-sized shrimp in the meal," and, "Needs a lot of improvements. Garlic and shrimp, tastes nothing like garlic ... actually pretty much tastes like nothing."

We're also docking points for price. A 42-ounce bag of Birds Eye Voila! Garlic Shrimp costs $8.97 at a Walmart in Chicago, or $9.99 at a Kroger in Ohio. For a frozen veggie medley with a small handful of shrimp and pasta, the price tag seems steep. But it's ready from frozen in about 20 minutes (hooray, we guess?). Elsewhere online, Walmart customers echo that Voila! Garlic Shrimp needs doctoring up with additional ingredients and more sauce to perform as a satisfying meal. Amazon customers say, "Could use more shrimp," and "bland and almost no shrimp."

Still, garlic shrimp notwithstanding, Birds Eye's Voila! Family meals are fast, veggie-centric, and totally work for budget-conscious foodies on busy weeknights. One Reddit thread in r/Frugal is dedicated to praising the product line, writing, "They have plenty of vegetables and excellent nutrition, cook easy and quickly," and "They're great for a quick meal when I don't feel like cooking," especially when bags go on sale in grocery stores. 

Instead of the garlic shrimp offering, we recommend Birds Eye Voila! Chicken Fried Rice, the frozen meal that took first place in our ranking for its flavorful, nutty-umami profile. Or, satisfy your garlic shrimp craving with our garlic shrimp pasta with tomato sauce recipe, which is ready in just 30 minutes — still convenient and low prep, with majorly more delivery than Birds Eye's frozen, premade miss.