The Best French Onion Soup at the Grocery Store Isn’t Easy to Find (But We Did)

The best French onion soup is served in a cozy French bistro. It comes in a two-tone stoneware crock with bubbly cheese cresting its edges and drizzling down the side. It’s rich, it’s complex, it’s filling thanks to the crouton—and, frankly, it doesn’t taste a whole lot like most of the canned French onion soup you’ll find at the grocery store. 

Yep, I’m sorry to report that most store bought French onion soup (store bought onion soup, in general) is very, very bad. At best, it tastes like can. At worst, it’s sour and acrid and unpleasant. Heating some of these actually made my kitchen smell bad! Hey Campbell’s and Progresso, you need to go back to the drawing board or simply stop selling canned French onion soup altogether. 

What we looked for in the best French onion soup:

• Depth: The best French onion soup should at least attempt to approximate the rich flavor of French onion soup from a restaurant.
• Strong onion flavor: It should taste like caramelized onions, beef broth, and sherry. And it should actually contain onions.
• Not wildly salty: It shouldn’t be so salty you have to guzzle a glass of Liquid I.V. after you eat a bowl of it. 

I taste tested everything I could find in the way of French onion soup, including regular ol’ onion soup mixes, canned French onion soup, and even one frozen French onion soup that comes frozen with croutons and cheese already in the mix. 

If you don’t have a decent French restaurant in your area or if purchasing plane fare to Alsace isn’t in the cards this month, check out this list of the best onion soup you can buy at the grocery store.

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Best Onion Soup Mix (Runner Up)

Osem Onion Soup Mix

Instacart

Don’t freak out on me. I know you came here to read about the best French onion soup and this definitely is not French onion soup. It’s straight-up onion soup, but with some doctoring, I think you could turn it into something that’s more in line with the FOS ideal. It contains bits of dehydrated onion and it’s very oniony tasting once it’s simmered, but there’s no caramelized flavor of which to speak. This is a base, for sure, but it has a luscious fattiness a lot of the other onion soup mixes didn’t have and we appreciated that the schmaltz gave it some depth. Add some beef broth and some onions cooked in sherry, and you’ll be closer to having something worthy of croutons and bubbly Gruyere.

Credit: Merc / Instacart

Rating:

5/10

Sporks

Best Onion Soup Mix

Lipton Beefy Onion Soup Mix

Walmart

This is one of two Lipton onion soup mixes we taste tested, and this one is much better than the regular Lipton Onion Soup Mix, mostly because it doesn’t taste as unbearably salty (it actually contains more sodium, but I’ll let you figure that one out). If you’re shopping for onion soup mix, you might be tempted to just save a few cents by grabbing the generic instead of the Lipton—don’t do it! Other onion soup mixes we tasted contain dehydrated onion bits that look like they were browned in advance, and when you reconstitute the soup, the browned onions give everything a stale, bitter flavor. It’s really gross! This was the best onion soup mix we tried, largely because it avoids that pitfall. 

Credit: Merc / Walmart

Rating:

6/10

Sporks

Best Jarred

Rao’s French Onion Soup

Instacart

You’ll notice there isn’t a single canned French onion soup on this list. All the ones we tried were bad because they all have a tinny canned flavor. Rao’s French onion soup comes in a jar but, sadly, it still has a little bit of a tinny aftertaste on the finish, which I can’t necessarily explain. Still, you could do a lot worse. This has bigger pieces of onion than either of the mixes we tried and the onions are actually caramelized. This stuff definitely needs cheese melted on top—some good Gruyere is going to offset that aftertaste. It’s not going to knock your socks off, but it’s the best French onion soup when a lunchtime craving hits. 

Credit: Merc / Instacart

Rating:

7/10

Sporks

Best of the Best

Cuisine Adventures French Onion Soup

Cuisine Adventures

Most of the best Trader Joe’s soups can be found in the refrigerated section alongside the sausages and salad kits, but the very best store bought French onion soup is actually hiding in the frozen aisle. We tasted Cuisine Adventure French Onion Soup last and, after all the other junk we tasted, this stuff was a revelation. In the box, you get two frozen cylinders of soup that already have croutons suspended in the frozen liquid and bits of cheese on top. You just put one of the cylinders in an oven-safe bowl, heat it for 30 mins, et voila, you have cheesy, flavorful French onion soup that’s nearly on par with what you’d get at a restaurant. The soup itself is loaded with caramelized onions and the broth tastes so rich. Even though it’s vegetarian, you’d really think there was beef broth in the mix. It tastes like it was cooked slowly on a stove in a quaint bistro’s kitchen. The cheese is chewy and super milky tasting. I ate the entire bowl because I just couldn’t resist. If you spot this at your local Trader Joe’s (or Costco, apparently!), buy it!

Credit: Liv Averett / Cuisine Adventures

Rating:

10/10

Sporks

Other French onion soups we tried:

Progresso French Onion, Campbell’s French Onion condensed soup, Campbell’s Creamy Onion condensed soup, Knorr Onion Soup Mix, Lipton Onion Soup Mix, Great Value Onion Soup Mix