The Best (and Worst) Chicken Noodle Soups at the Grocery Store

They say baseball is America’s pastime, but if you ask me, it’s chicken noodle soup. So many people raised in this country reach for a can of chicken soup when they’re sick, or sad, or even just cold. Chicken noodle soup is more like a remedy to all things than a food.

But when you’re at the grocery store, which brand do you choose? You’re not making this stuff yourself today, so who’s doing it for you? I tried eight popular brands of chicken noodle soup and ranked them to find out.

I can’t say this comes as much of a surprise. Rao’s, the famously unbookable New York restaurant, makes some of the best pasta sauce in the game (it even beat out Carbone in our taste test). Same deal here. This is as good of a chicken noodle soup as you are likely to get from a grocery store. The rest of this competition wasn’t close at all.

Though Rao’s chicken noodle soup has better chicken, better noodles, and better carrots, it really all comes down to the broth for me. Nearly every other soup’s broth is so painfully bland, but this is full of Italian seasoning, garlicky and warming. I’ll get this the next time I want chicken noodle soup.

Who am I, to condone this level of cheating? A corrupt ranker, drunk on chicken soup power, that’s who. Old El Paso brought jalapeños to a celery fight, and as such, defeated every other soup that isn’t called Rao’s.

The brilliance of what Old El Paso has going on here is that the peppers are more like the baseline flavor of the soup itself, to such a point where if you were to toss some tortilla strips and avocado in here, you could make a reasonable argument that this is tortilla soup. Is this fair? No way. But who would stand to oppose me? You? I think not. Good job on the “chicken noodle soup”, Old El Paso.

Wild that this is basically just a souped up (you wouldn’t be able to resist, either) version of the last place soup, the upgrade here is incredibly substantial. The truth is, this probably gets an entire placement boost for the convenience of the microwavable cup, but still, this is solid. Unlike the other Campbell’s chicken soup ventures, this broth has flavor. You can see the seasoning, floating right there next to the carrots and celery (two things this has that the classic doesn’t).

The microwave instructions are stupendously wrong; a minute and a half won’t do the trick for 16 ounces of soup. Be prepared to zap it again, but otherwise, this is convenient and tasty enough to belong in the Top 3.

Progresso’s chicken noodle soup has some of the most real-tasting chicken of any soup here, and it’s almost a pretty good soup. I wish there was more flavor in the broth, or the chicken, or the noodles, or anywhere, and if I’m being honest, I prefer chunks of carrots to circles. But if you’re sick and need to dump a can of soup into a pot, this is a reasonable enough one to do that with.

I did not care for this at all when I ranked it against the rest of Panera’s soups, but compared to a lot of the canned nastiness out there, it’s not bad. Visually, the chicken looks great, with shredded strands all through the soup. It’s dry and tasteless though, and because there’s so much of it, it’s hard to avoid in every spoonful. The noodles are nice and toothsome, but the broth is both bland and thick, which is a strange combo. You’re better off in other places.

I wanted a brand like Annie’s Organic to brag about how wholesome their soup is, and what better way to do that than through some fierce, veggie-driven broth and thick cut carrots and celery?

There’s none of that going on. It’s not gross and feels like real, homemade soup, but it’s bland. This would have been enough to defeat Panera, but the chicken is bizarre in this thing. It almost tastes like cold, fried tofu, or tempeh or something. Looking at the ingredients, I noticed that this chicken is made with tapioca starch. It’s not for me. At least Panera’s dry chicken tastes like it came from an actual chicken.

This “heart healthy” Campbell’s joint tastes somewhere in between the other two Campebll’s soups. There’s nothing to write home about here, and it’s got that same, odd, tofu-ish chicken that Annie’s has. That stuff spooks me.

Man, this is not it. The noodles are gummy and practically melt on your tongue. The chicken, if you can find any, is cubed to the size of peas, and the broth just tastes like oily chicken fat. Convenient microwavable cup be damned. Don’t eat this.

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