Are cheaper hot-dog brands worth the savings?

Americans will spend an average of $130 in 2025 for their July Fourth barbecues. The Wells Fargo Agri-Food Institute reported that the big increases since summer 2024 in the prices of beef and eggs are the main contributors to an overall cost increase of 2.2% for the items on 2025 holiday shopping lists.

Beef for burgers costs 7.4% more now than in 2024, according to the institute, which surveyed costs for a 10-guest cookout. Eggs for deviled eggs are up 40% over July 2024 because of early year price increases brought on by bird flu and supply chain disruptions.

There's a bit of good news on prices, the survey found. Watermelon and strawberries are a tiny bit cheaper now, and apple pie and ice cream are just slightly more expensive.

The Dispatch found an unexpected way to save when staff tasted 15 brands of hot dogs available at central Ohio supermarkets. The conclusion: Cheap hot dogs aren't so bad.

It's not what was expected. I swore off chicken dogs years ago after a horrible purchase during my penny-pinching college days, back when store-brand generics all came in plain-white packaging with plain-black lettering identifying their contents and nothing more. Good thing, because it would have been hard to determine what "hot dog"-brand hot dogs actually were otherwise.

I'd not knowingly eaten a non-beef, non-pork or non-beef and pork hot dog since, although my penchant for cheap beer remained intact. But our taste test to determine whether cheap dogs can compete against pricier products — especially important if you're throwing enough on the grill to feed an entire Fourth of July gathering — required biting into all the combos out there.

Here's what we found:

Here are the rest of our conclusions.

The dog served at a number of local hot dog restaurants is also sold locally at Weiland's Market, 3600 Indianola Ave. It's on the more costly side of those we tasted: $8.99 for a 12-ounce, eight-dog package.

Individually, the dogs are on the smaller side at about 1.5 ounces each. But they pack a lot of flavor with a high fat content, firm texture and good snap.

These dogs, available from the Weiland's butcher case, are sold individually; ours came out to about $1.20 each. They're great, classic pork hot dogs with a perfect snap.

These Weiland's franks are more lightly seasoned than all-beef hot dogs, which is welcomed if you're going to load them up with condiments and toppings.

Based on taste alone, we liked Meijer's $2.19 generically packaged franks better than the pricier, private-label Frederik's brand. They're more like ballpark hot dogs: less garlicky, less beefy, less huge.

Meijer franks are much better than you'd expect of a chicken-and-pork store brand. They lost points in texture (soft) and snap (little, if any), both of which can be fixed with a little char on the grill.

At just $1.25 per 12-ounce package, Bar S Classic Franks are about the cheapest you can buy in local supermarkets. They're sold at Kroger, Save A Lot, Family Dollar and Dollar Tree stores.

The chicken and pork hot dogs have a texture that's soft to the point of puffy, but a charcoal-induced crust — is there any other way to grill a hot dog than way too much? — will add what's missing.

At $8.29 for a six-dog package, The Great Organic Uncured Turkey Hot Dog from Applegate Organics is overpriced and over-named. Of the 15 dogs we tried, it scored lowest in texture (hard and dry) and lowest in flavor (a not-meaty aftertaste, caused perhaps by the vinegar we saw on the ingredients list).

Trust me, a Toledo native, when I say: Tony Packo's hot dogs at one of its northwestern Ohio restaurants are an experience. But something is lost in the remote version available in the Weiland's butcher case. They were too much of everything — the casing was too thick and chewy, the seasoning too salty and smokey. And at $3.90 for two, eight of them would have come to more than $15.

Farmington Franks were $1.19 for a 12-ounce package at Save A Lot. While they had a better texture than the other low-cost hot dogs we tried, the flavor fell short.

Aldi's Parkview-brand hot dogs were the cheapest we tried, at 99 cents for an eight-dog, 12-ounce package. The chicken, pork and beef dogs just weren't as good as other cheap brands, such as Ekrich.

Dining Reporter Bob Vitale can be reached at [email protected] or at @dispatchdining on the Instagram social platform.