‘More like vegetable cooking water’: the best (and worst) supermarket chicken soup

Whose soup is a chunky triumph? And whose is a sludgy mess? Felicity Cloake tries out supermarket takes on chilled, ready-made chicken and vegetable soup. The best blenders to blitz like a pro, tried and tested. The Guardian’s journalism is independent. We will earn a commission if you buy something through an affiliate link. Learn more.

As a small child, my dream was to open an underwater restaurant (no, me neither), and the short menu I painstakingly wrote out for said venture started with chicken and vegetable soup. Which is to say, I have history with this dish. It feels familiar, comforting and overwhelmingly wholesome, yet I don’t often eat it these days, not least because I’ve never found one commercially that makes any welfare claims for the chicken concerned (and I’m generally too cheap to make it myself).

So I was quite excited about this particular taste test – and perhaps inevitably disappointed that even the most expensive samples gave so little information about the provenance of their meat. That said, with a handful of exceptions, the standard was pretty high flavour-wise, and Aldi, Marks & Spencer, Morrisons and Sainsbury’s all at least note that they use British chicken, which is a start.

For me, chicken and vegetable soup suggests a chunky broth, rather than a creamy puree, but both types are represented here and have their merits in the comfort department – though, personally, having been reminded how much I like the stuff, I’m now more inclined to make my own. Should you be less fussy, you’ll find some decent alternatives below.

£2.75 for 600g at Waitrose. ★★★★★. Attractive looking and bursting with both vegetables (I liked the sweetness of the peas more than the overcooked spinach) and meat. It has a distinctly chickeny flavour, but I’d like to know where it came from. This one feels like it’s doing me good.

£2.45 for 600g at Co-op. ★★★★☆. Generous British chicken content (though I’d prefer pieces of leg to dry strands of breast). In common with many of the soups tested, the base tastes more of vegetables – of which, to be fair, there is a great range: potato, carrot, cabbage, onion, peas, leek, swede, celery and parsnip. Commendably clean ingredients list.

£2.40 for 400g at Ocado. £2.40 for 400g at Tesco. This feels more like a soup that you might serve in little cups at a dinner party than something you’d microwave for lunch. Oddly, it has the lowest chicken content of all those I try (again, origin unspecified), and I’d have preferred them to leave the pieces out of the silky, creamy base. But this has a full flavour, and is sweet with root vegetables, savoury with alliums and rich with cream and butter. Delicious.

£2.75 for 600g at Ocado. The base is comfortingly creamy, but it always feels odd to me to find bits in a thick puree. Nice pieces of chicken thigh, though, and a sweet, soothing root-vegetable flavour. £2.58 for 560g at Asda. £3.45 for 560g at Sainsbury’s.

This has a winningly chunky, almost-homemade feel, with generous hunks of vegetable and chicken, and a pronounced, pleasing taste of green leek. The chicken is more of a texture than a flavour, and weirdly, though Yorkshire Provender proudly declares it sources its parsley from Yorkshire (from May to October), there’s no mention of the meat’s provenance. But it’s tasty nonetheless.

Sign up to The Filter. Get the best shopping advice from the Filter team straight to your inbox. The Guardian’s journalism is independent. We will earn a commission if you buy something through an affiliate link. after newsletter promotion. £2.25 for 600g at Aldi.

★★★☆☆. There are quite a few bigger pieces of chicken in here, and I like the sweetness of the swede, but in general the vegetables are a bit too soft. It’s tasty enough, but with no particularly distinctive flavour. Inoffensive, but unmemorable.

£2.20 for 560g at Sainsbury’s. £2.20 for 560g at Tesco. I’d describe this more as a potato soup with pieces of chicken, which is no bad thing – I love a starchy spud soup. This one’s a bit salty, though, and if you’re going to include bits in there, it would be nice to have some other, sweeter vegetables along with the chicken. But I can imagine this might hit the spot if I was feeling under the weather.

£1.80 for 600g at Tesco. ★☆☆☆☆. A bit flat – more like underseasoned vegetable stock than chicken, which is a shame, given that the meat came all the way from Thailand to end up in this faintly disappointing soup. I like the chewy pearl barley, though.

£1.80 for 600g at Sainsbury’s. The star is for using British chicken at this price point, although the strands are so small that they’re difficult to pick out, both in the bowl and from my teeth afterwards. What with that, the small pieces of vegetable and the murky rags of kale (leafy greens don’t really lend themselves to being reheated), it’s not very exciting to look at or eat; more like vegetable cooking water than stock.