10 Popular Costco Soups, Ranked Worst To Best

In the winter months, Costco dedicates a whole aisle of refrigerators to showcase prepared soups. All look savory and delicious, but you may want to know which one is the tastiest of all. When we tried 10 of the most popular varieties, we learned that none of these soups will let you down. Ultimately, they're all yummy and require almost no cleanup. Most of them come in plastic tubs that go straight into the microwave for a few minutes. If you don't want to get a bowl dirty, you could even conceivably eat the soup straight out of the tub with a spoon. That's especially handy if you're feeling under the weather.

Here, we've ranked each product according to a variety of factors, starting with taste. Your favorite will depend on the flavors you like best and may not coincide with ours. That's okay — different strokes for different folks, after all. We've also included a description of the ingredients, texture, and price of each product so you can choose accordingly even if we have different soup opinions. We also got some kids involved. The 4-year-old consistently gave most soups an "Ewww-gaud!" rating, though he ate two spoonfuls of the tomato basil. The 8-year-old, also an openly picky eater, surprised us by giving the gumbo a seven out of 10, though no soup received a perfect score on his scale. Our main takeaway: adults will probably find more to like in Costco's refrigerated soup aisle than their kids.

If you're a fan of seafood flavors that call to mind a trip to a windblown pier for freshly made chowder, Blount's is brewing up the soup for you. It's a gluten-free selection, good news for diners on restricted diets, though it's loaded with clam stock, clam meat, and codfish powder, plus a shellfish warning meant to ward off anyone with a fish or iodine allergy. It's also one of the blander soups in the Costco selection in both color and flavor, despite the inclusion of onions and garlic in the recipe. Maybe the fact that the primary ingredient is cream keeps the more intriguing flavors from surfacing. Bits of clam do their best to add texture to the mild seafood sweetness, but we found none of it to be terribly impressive.

At $14.99 for the two-bucket package, each serving up six bowls, the per-serving price turns out to be $1.25, which is quite affordable for chowder fans. Maybe we just need to see clam chowder steaming in a bread bowl while gazing at an ocean in the distance to be enchanted by this harbor favorite. Anyone with a taste for homebound clam chowder may be thrilled to have an at-home experience, even if they happen to be in a landlocked location. As for us, we'd gladly throw this soup back in favor of a more exciting catch.

If you're a fan of lasagna soup, buying Blount's version at Costco is a good way to enjoy it without having to put together and cook a ton of ingredients. Here, those include tomatoes, turkey sausage, onions, cream, pasta, and parmesan cheese, all of which can get expensive if you're looking to make it from scratch at home. Buying two packs of Blount's lasagna soup at Costco (each with six one-cup portions), on the other hand, costs around $13, making for a potentially attractive purchase that saves both time and money.

The best things about this lasagna soup may be how easy it is to heat up and its low cost, but there are several issues. First is the texture of the disappointingly soft lasagna noodles. The other problem is the overwhelming taste of fennel, anise seed, and black pepper. Often, canned and packaged soups go heavy on salt and seasoning to make up for tasteless ingredients. This soup leans on that crutch too heavily.

Anyone with a cold should head to Costco to pick up a tub of chicken noodle soup, which is made from surplus rotisserie chickens. Each spoonful brims with chunks of celery, carrots, chicken, and noodles, while the broth is as thick as egg drop soup to the point where some commentators recommend thinning it out with a bit of water before enjoying. To us, this deli item tastes worse than homemade chicken noodle soup, but a thousand times better than canned. That makes it perfect for those days you need comfort food but don't have enough energy to make it for yourself. The price per pound is about $3.50, and a tub contains just under 4 pounds.

The most positive thing about this soup is the fresh ingredients, especially the Costco rotisserie chicken. Yet, there are far more negative points. First, the overpowering salty flavor (650 milligrams of sodium per serving) makes it hard to swallow. Meanwhile, the large chunks of veggies and chicken mean that you'll likely have to use your spoon to cut these into smaller pieces that will actually fit in your mouth. Finally, the noodles in this product are thick and floury, contributing to the heavy feel. A more delicate pasta would have been a far better choice.

Rich with kale, garlic, and homestyle sausage galore, Ivar's Rustic Zuppa Toscana Soup sounds like the soup of the season for Italian food fans of all stripes. There's spice a-plenty from the sausage, providing warmth-with-warmth that permeates the broth. Bits of carrot lend texture and unexpected bursts of veggie fresh flavor against the umami overtones. Enjoying a bowl with a Caesar salad would provide a refreshing one-two punch to temper the boldness, though if you're looking for a more complete meal, a dish of pesto-topped gnocchi wouldn't be a bad way to go if you need a partner dish for this Old World charmer.

For the budget-friendly price of about $11.50, you can get 10 servings from a single purchase — five per container in a two-container package — for around $1.15 per serving. Compared to the $8.99 or so cost of a bowl of Olive Garden's famous Zuppa Toscana, that's a savings of about $7.84 per bowl. Imagine feeding a whole hungry crew at home instead of hauling everyone to the OG, and the cost becomes even more attractive. Thought it's delicious, the strong personality of the seasonings here may be a hard sell to pickier eaters. This might be a soup best enjoyed by sophisticated palates with a taste for robust cuisine.

Serve fresh tomato basil soup from Costco if you want to take your grilled cheese to the next level. Certainly, after trying this, you'll never buy Campbell's again — but is it much better? This refrigerated soup by Boudin Sourdough is a rich, thick mix of tomato, basil, and cream. Its flavor of fresh tomatoes can bring the essence of midsummer right onto your tongue even on the coldest winter day. The price is accessible — this soup costs about $10 for 60 ounces ($0.17 per ounce). Campbell's tomato is not much cheaper at around $0.13 per ounce.

The smooth texture of this soup is pleasantly creamy, but the overly sweet flavor is problematic. The first spoonful draws you in, but by the time you finish your bowl, your taste buds will want something less sugary. A glance at the label reveals that sugar is the fourth ingredient, and each serving contains 16 grams of the stuff, 8 grams of which are added sugars. That's a lot for soup but not the highest sugar content among the soups we reviewed.

Some soups may leave you hungry after you eat them, but this broccoli cheddar by Panera surely never will — all that creamy cheese fills you right up. When you stir the tub after microwaving it, you'll come across thumb-sized chunks of broccoli in the depths that fit on your spoon perfectly, as well as inch-long slices of carrot. Those ingredients come together to make an alluring lunch. Your officemates won't even complain about it because this soup isn't stinky like most dishes with broccoli; here, the aroma is barely noticeable. Even better, a pack of this soup costs around $10 and should fill up about eight bowls.

The best aspect of this broccoli cheddar soup is the number of vegetables in it, namely the noticeable chunks of broccoli and ribbons of carrot. The flavor is boldly cheesy and tastes just as broccoli cheddar soup should. However, it is powerfully salty (990 milligrams of sodium per serving). If that's especially bothersome, you can take a microwaved potato, cut it into cubes, and add those to the soup, though that takes away a significant part of its convenience.

The gumbo from Costco is tremendously flavorful and packed with morsels of shrimp, chicken, and sausage as well as the classic addition of okra. In Blount's soup, okra is the fourth ingredient on the label and makes its appearance as half-inch squares. These are not as pretty as the flower-shaped slices in other soups but are certainly effective as a thickener. You'll also dig out pieces of celery, bell pepper, and rice. The price tag for two sleeves is $11.

The most unappetizing things about this soup are the sludge-like color and chewy texture of the shrimp. However, it does contain the perfect level of spice, finely chopped pieces, and a well-balanced ratio of ingredients. To make gumbo like this at home, a cook would need to invest quite a bit of time into chopping the veggies and then sautéing them to the right texture. In one of these tubs, the gumbo tastes nearly homemade and is ready to serve much faster.

The soothing burnt orange hue of Panera Autumn Squash Soup signals your brain to crave comfortable fare in cozy quarters. It's the ultimate fall color offering subdued sunshine in a bowl for anyone in need of warming from the inside. Being a vegetable-based cream soup, this soothing dish is vegetarian rather than being one of Panera's vegan menu selections, something to consider when purchasing a package if you have milk-sensitive eaters around your table. A sprinkling of croutons or toasted pumpkin seeds on top is enough to dress up the dish for its seasonal debut.

Though pumpkin is the main ingredient and we were expecting an earthy flavor here, we found the soup to be quite sweet, more of a butternut squash concoction thickened up with cream, cream cheese, and milk for an ultra-silky texture. There's brown sugar in the mix too, as well as apple juice and honey, ensuring a balanced arrangement of tasting notes. Beware: These sweeteners also ramp up the sugar to 20 grams per serving, of which 16 grams are added sugars — that seems like a lot for a soup.

At $11.99 for a two-pack, each containing six servings, Costco's dollar-per-bowl price more than bests the Panera listing of $7.99 for a single order. If your family is eager for a mellow autumn lunch or supper that doesn't test their taste buds too aggressively, this is a great soup to start with.

The aroma of Ivar's Loaded Baked Potato Soup is enough to drive away the autumn chill. But that's nothing compared to what a spoonful can do for a weary, soup-craving soul. The texture is beyond chowder; it's more akin to a thickened stew, with the generous potato base providing a sturdy foundation for chunks of uncured bacon. Cheddar cheese, garlic, and black pepper all pile on the flavor to make what we'd call a Soup with the Works. You could freshen it up with some grated cheddar or a few snips of green onion on top, but it's just as hearty and tasty without and one of our favorites on the list.

Price-wise, with a two-pack at the competitive Costco price of $9.99, you'll be paying $1 for each bowl if you divvy up a container at the five-serving instructions on the label. The comfort food spirit of this soup is enough to inspire potato soup devotees to split the tub in half and call it dinner. Of course, your dinner dollar won't go quite as far, but you're still coming out on top. A bowl of baked potato soup at Cheddar's starts at about $4.79, almost half of what you get in your 10-serving purchase. Serve with a salad and a crusty roll, and you have one of the best Costco soups to serve you and your family.

Kirkland's chicken tortilla soup is nothing short of delicious. It's packed with little squares of chopped red and green bell peppers, shredded chicken, cubes of carrots, and kernels of corn in a tomato base. The flavor is spicy, sweet, and salty. It could make a big splash at a dinner party if you served it with additions like sour cream, avocado chunks, crushed tortilla chips, cilantro, and lime wedges. Guests would have fun putting in just what they like and, even better, you could have everything ready in a matter of minutes. It won't cost you much either — in this case, $9 for two tubs, which makes it the cheapest soup on this list.

The slightly tough texture of the chicken is the worst thing about this soup, but everything else is top-notch. It's flavorful, easy to eat, simple to prepare, and low-priced. Even the level of spice is just right — it'll wake up your taste buds, but it is still mild enough that most kids will be willing to eat it. If you try only one soup from Costco, it should be this one.

Reviewing soups from Costco's refrigerated soup section was fun, delicious, and eye-opening. Previously, we'd only eaten homemade or canned soup. The latter always tasted tinny and wasn't appealing, so we were skeptical of these products and worried they might have a similar taste. We picked up one of every soup that was available in Costco's open refrigerator — other soups like bacon cheese, lobster bisque, and vegetarian squash weren't in stock. 

As we tested each item, we paid attention to the texture, ingredients, flavor, and price of each product. We also got some kids involved for a greater variety of opinions, a perspective that could be especially useful for parents.