The Worst Whole Foods Prepared Soup Tastes Like Tomato Water And Regret

We may receive a commission on purchases made from links.

If you find yourself at the Whole Foods soup bar eying an Italian classic, stop immediately. While you would expect minestrone to be filling, texturally interesting, flavorful, and comforting, it is instead a disappointing watery mess that makes us grieve for the vegetables swimming in it. We taste-tested eight prepared soups at Whole Foods, and none of them were such a far cry from their classic counterpart as the minestrone.

The soup was watery and flavorless — two adjectives that should never be attached to the otherwise thick and hearty minestrone that's traditionally bursting with different flavors on account of the many ingredients it combines. The Whole Foods version contains a plethora of ingredients, such as tomatoes, beans, squash, lemon juice, fennel seed, red pepper flakes, and even parmesan! But this variety just doesn't come across in the texture or the taste; the whole soup simply falls flat.

Whole Foods sells the packaged version of this tomato juice (sorry, soup) online, and many people who have purchased it share our feelings about it. The vegetables are mushy, the reviews say, completely drowned in the tomato broth. Some expected the kind of soup that could rival a homemade one, ultimately concluding it's genuinely easier (and possibly cheaper) to just make one at home.

It's one thing to eat a bad soup — it's another to eat it at a place that's famous for organic, premium ingredients and high price tags. While it's true that the prices at Whole Foods have somewhat dropped since Amazon acquired it in 2017, the store still charges well above most other retailers. As such, people expect a certain quality, and when it comes to the minestrone, Whole Foods does not deliver. On Amazon, 24 ounces of the soup cost almost $9, with some customers noting that it was not worth the money and tasted cheap.

It's not all bad, though. There are still some things that Whole Foods gets right, including soups. The next time you're shopping for the best pantry staples at Whole Foods and find yourself craving a warming stew, we found Coconut Curry Chicken Soup to be the best of the bunch. It had everything that the minestrone lacked — proper thickness, delicious flavor, and perfect texture. Looking for a meat-free option instead? Vegan Lentil Dal with Spinach came in as a close second and was supremely tasty, too.