The Canned Soup Brand With Some Of The Best Quality Ingredients

From the three-minute microwave time of flavorful, filling, pre-made soups to the stocks and broths that fuel our favorite recipes, canned soups are a cornerstone of a well-stocked kitchen pantry. While some of these soups are filled with artificial ingredients, or cheap ones if they're real, and more salt than you should probably have, others are bursting with good, clean, high-quality ingredients.

To separate the wheat from the chaff, Daily Meal asked experienced chef Monika Sudakov – with a little guidance from Jazmine Hall of Taste Buds Kitchen – to taste test and compare ingredients between dozens of soups. Sudakov found the big winners came from Pacific Foods.

The main reasons were its wealth of options that exclude genetically modified ingredients, plus many of them have a suitably low level of sodium. Among those options are plenty of vegan-friendly recipes, too. Pacific Foods isn't perfect; it'd be nice if its canned varieties came in single-serving sizes, for example. But you'd be hard-pressed to find a better, higher-quality brand.

Among the standout Pacific Foods soups for Monika Sudakov, flavorwise, were its organic roasted red pepper and tomato soup, and organic cumin carrot oat milk soup. Although these happen to be boxed, not canned, taking a closer look at their ingredient lists still highlights the brand's quality. So let's do that.

The first thing you notice is that for both soups, all but two or three of its ingredients have little asterisks next to their names, signifying that those ingredients are completely organic. Those that aren't? Water, sea salt, and, in the case of the tomato soup, sodium citrate. But don't let that raise an eyebrow; sodium citrate is just a special kind of salt, one you can easily buy yourself, that's commonly used for flavor or as a preservative. Give it a spin yourself next time you make mac and cheese.

The next thing you notice is how minimal the nutritional values for cholesterol, fats, and sugar are per serving, with no value being above 10%. This, and the calories per serving being only 100-120, leaves you ample space to indulge elsewhere. The only high value is salt. But when you consider the ever-stalwart Cambell's condensed chicken noodle contains 39% of your daily serving of sodium, Sudakov's favorites from Pacific Foods — at just 15-17% — are a more sensible choice.