M&S Stanway – Very Veggie Toastie and Magic Maple Syrup Coffee

The new M&S is now in Stanway, just outside Colchester town centre. The old one used to be in the town, and this new place still gets a lot of local people moaning on Facebook and in the Evening Gazette about how they shouldn’t have moved it out of town.

But every time I’ve been here, it’s much busier than the old town one ever was. It’s also much nicer than the one in town was, if I’m honest. As someone who has worked in a number of shops in Colchester town centre, a lot of them felt like they were falling apart anyway.

I really wanted to try the new toastie from M&S Food.

The Very Veggie Toastie costs £6.50, and it has a nice Mediterranean twist to it.

It’s made with seasoned butternut squash, red onion petals, red and yellow peppers, vegan feta cheese, black olives, red pepper tapenade and a herby vegan dressing, all inside sourdough bread.

There are plenty of flavours going on in each bite, and the vegan feta cheese was surprisingly very nice. It had a proper tangy flavour, which I’ve realised is what I like from vegan cheese.

I think that’s probably why I like La Fauxmagerie cheeses so much, because they usually have that tangy flavour to them.

The bread felt like it had some quality about it too. If you like Mediterranean-style food, this toastie is definitely worth trying. I thoroughly enjoyed it.

Next, I tried the Magic Maple Syrup coffee.

I was expecting it to be an overly sweet coffee and a bit gimmicky, but it wasn’t quite what I expected. You do have to choose oat milk on the touchscreen for this one, and they use Minor Figures barista oat milk, which is high on my list of plant-based barista milks I like.

The first sip genuinely shocked me. I was expecting a Starbucks or Costa-style overly sweet coffee, but instead, it had quite a strong, dark maple syrup taste. It was almost more like drinking a shot.

You probably won’t finish it thinking, “I need another one immediately,” but I did enjoy it.

Like I said, I was expecting something completely different, and I was happy to be proved wrong. It was something different, and I can see why some people would hate it, while others would like its darker, sweet flavour notes.

The Magic Maple Syrup coffee costs £3.60, and they don’t charge extra for oat milk, which is always a nice little win.