Best Cherry Pie Filling in a Can [Taste Test]

The best cherry pie filling tastes like luscious, plump, cooked cherries—not like maraschino cherries soaked in cough syrup. Unfortunately, that’s what a lot of canned cherry pie filling tastes like, even from a brand you might have assumed is the best cherry pie filling brand by virtue of its ubiquity (we’ll get to that).

Anyway, you no longer have to choke down subpar pie, because we found the best canned cherry pie filling at the grocery store. If you’re going to bother making a pie rather than just buying one, you should use the right ingredients (that goes for ready made pie crust, too). We cracked open a bunch of cans of cherry pie filling to find out which ones are acceptable shortcuts to a tasty dessert and which ones would be more at home in the medicine aisle next to the cherry Delsym.

Best No Sugar Added

Great Value Cherry Pie Filling or Topping No Sugar Added

Walmart

When I first took a bite of this canned cherry pie filling I didn’t see that the label says it’s “flavored with sucralose,” and I genuinely couldn’t taste that it contains an artificial sweetener, so that’s good! Thanks to the sucralose, it’s much lower in sugar than other brands. By way of comparison, the Aldi cherry pie filling (#2 on this list) has 19 grams of sugar per serving (a third of a cup) and this has only 4 grams per serving. That’s a stunning difference and the lingering flavor of sucralose is almost totally imperceptible. If you are on a low sugar diet but want some cherry pie, this is the best cherry pie filling you can buy. You can even ditch the pie crust and just serve this over some low-sugar ice cream.

Credit: Merc / Walmart

Rating:

8.5/10

Sporks

Best More Fruit

Baker’s Corner More Fruit Cherry Pie Filling and Topping

Instacart

We’ve recently tried a couple of pie filling options from Aldi’s Baker’s Corner brand and we’ve been very impressed. I love the tart, muted flavor of this canned cherry pie filling. It really tastes like cherries, despite all the syrupy goop. There are a lot of plump, whole cherries in this can. I was stunned to open a can of another cherry pie filling and discover that it contained literally zero whole cherries and only goop and skins. This is bursting with cherries that are a little pale rather than artificially red, which seems like a nice thing. This is the best cherry pie filling in a can if you want something that’s packed with fruit and cheap as hell as a bonus.

Credit: Merc / Instacart

Rating:

9/10

Sporks

Best of the Best

Kroger Cherry Pie Filling

Ralphs

Duncan Hines is probably the most prolific, most ubiquitous purveyor of canned cherry pie filling, so you might think it was safe to assume it’s the best cherry pie filling brand. But it ain’t! That honor goes to Kroger, owner of many, many grocery chains and maker of the best cherry pie filling we tried in our taste test. Kroger’s cherry pie filling has big juicy whole cherries and does not taste like fake cherry flavor—it just tastes like sugar (or corn syrup, I guess) and cherries. The cherries are nice and tart, but overall it is still very sweet (sweeter than the other two varieties on this list), so it feels ready to toss into a pie shell and eat. A lot of Kroger brand products have surprised us lately, and this is one of them. Throw this in a baking dish, top it with a crumbly streusel and a scoop of vanilla ice cream, and you’ve got a hell of a dessert.

Credit: Merc / Ralphs

Rating:

9.5/10

Sporks