Not possible, I thought, to royally screw up sardines. There is really not much to them. Remove the head and tail, put into container, add oil, seal, right? Wrong. You also need to remove the scales. These S&F Food Importer sardines are simply terrible. They were so bad that I went back to the grocery store here in Toronto, Canada, and asked for a refund, which I rarely do, and they refused.
These S&F sardines come in a oval can, 16 x 11 x 3.8cm, with a yellow label labelled “Sardines in vegetable oil”, 425g, 15oz, so it is really close to 1 lb, bar code 0 69694 00817 4. I opened up the first can and there are lots, and I mean LOTS of scales on the sardines. Frankly I did not even realize that sardines had such large scales, as all the other sardines I bought the scales are gone. As the store refused to give me a refund, I’ll have to manually take off all the scales from these sardines.
As a Chinese family we buy a lot of food made in China. Mostly it is dry goods, but sometimes they are cans. My wife simply shrugs her shoulders when she buys a bad product from China. We’ll simply not buy that brand next time. I hope that in the future China can improve their product quality. No more S&F foods for me or my family
I’ll need to eat these myself, because they are unfit to serve my kids or wife. With this I’ll be more wary of buying canned food that is product of China.

Worst Sardines ever: S&F Sardines in vegetable oil, product of China. The sardines come with lots of scales, which you must manually remove. Photo by Don Tai

Worst Sardines ever: S&F Sardines in vegetable oil, product of China. The sardines come with lots of scales, which you must manually remove. Photo by Don Tai