Best Chicken Broth for Your Next Pot of Soup

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The best chicken broth is the foundation of pretty much every good homemade soup. Even if you’re making bean and kale soup or another soup doesn’t contain actual chicken meat, you still need a good, savory chicken broth as your base to bring all the flavors to life. I know it isn’t soup season (I just broke out into a sweat typing the word “soup”), but this info will come in handy very soon. Promise.

For this taste test, we were looking for chicken broth with a lot of flavor. And not just chicken flavor. While chicken stock is mostly just water infused with the flavor of chicken (bones and all), broth should taste like other stuff, too—veggies, seasonings, and actual chicken meat. Let me tell ya, store bought chicken broths taste dramatically different. From the best low sodium chicken broth to one that tastes like tasty, fatty chicken skin, this is the best tasting chicken broth at the grocery store.


best low sodium chicken broth

Best Low Sodium

Trader Joe’s Organic Low Sodium Chicken Broth

If you’re looking for the best low sodium chicken broth, you should really be checking labels. So many “low sodium” and “lower sodium” broths have just as much salt as varieties that don’t claim to be low sodium. That said, Trader Joe’s low sodium chicken broth is the only low sodium chicken broth we tasted that is actually low sodium (50 mg a cup) and actually tastes like chicken instead of just water and maybe some veggie stock. Great Value’s low sodium broth also tasted great, but that’s because it has 550 mg of sodium per serving! That’s as much as Trader Joe’s regular organic chicken broth! This is the best you can do if you want a chicken broth that’s actually low sodium.

Credit: Merc / Trader Joe’s

Rating:

8.5/10

Sporks

best chicken broth

Best Budget

Kroger Chicken Broth

If you shop at a Kroger-owned grocery store (Fred Meyer, Baker’s, Ralphs, King Soopers, etc. etc.), this is a great budget chicken broth. It’s very fresh tasting and very vegetable forward. According to the ingredients, it contains vegetable juice concentrates like carrot, celery, and onion—and you really taste all of them. It has so much flavor it’s almost tangy. It’s quite sodium rich, but if you’re looking for lots of flavor, this is among the best store bought chicken broth out there.

Rating:

8.5/10

Sporks

best store bought chicken broth

Best Vegetal

Imagine Free Range Chicken Broth

“This literally tastes like Campbell’s chicken soup,” my colleague Jordan Myrick said when they had a taste. There’s something very fresh and celery-forward about the flavor of this chicken broth that I really like. It has a lot of sodium (720 mg per serving), but that just means you won’t have to add as much to your finished soup. This is practically ready to roll—just add your fixins and simmer.  And shoutout Kettle & Fire chicken broth, which is also very bright and vegetal (AND has less sodium). This one just tasted better ultimately. If you like a very vegetable-forward chicken broth, this is the best tasting chicken broth. 

Credit: Merc / Instacart

Rating:

9/10

Sporks

best chicken broth

Best Fatty Flavor

O Organics Organic Chicken Broth

If you unabashedly devour the crackly skin that encases a roasted chicken, this is the best chicken broth for you. O Organics has a nice, fatty flavor that’s reminiscent of chicken skin. Other broths we tried that leaned fatty or oily tended to taste stale (lookin’ at you, Swanson), but this broth tastes more like freshly fried chicken. This would be the perfect broth to use a base for wonton soup.

Credit: Merc / Albertsons

Rating:

9/10

Sporks

best tasting chicken broth at the grocery store

Best of the Best

Trader Joe’s Organic Free Range Chicken Broth

When I tell you this is the best chicken broth by a mile, I’m not lying! It’s so flavorful and so fresh tasting. It leans chickeny rather than vegetal, and has an unbelievable roasted chicken flavor. It tastes like the drippings from a rotisserie chicken. I’m also pleased to report that this has a totally reasonable amount of sodium, 550 mg per serving, which is low sodium by some brands’ standards. Jordan brought this home after our taste test and made a pot of chicken noodle soup and raved about it. It’s the best tasting chicken broth and it’s only costs about two bucks a carton. 

Credit: Merc / Trader Joe’s

Rating:

10/10

Sporks

Other products we tried: Kettle & Fire Chicken Broth, Great Value Chicken Broth, Swanson Chicken Broth, Swanson Reduced Sodium, Great Value Reduced Sodium, Kettle & Fire Low Sodium, Sprouts Organic Free Range, Bona Fide No Salt Added, Signature Select, Signature Select Reduced Sodium, Simple Truth Low Sodium

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About the Author

Gwynedd Stuart

Howdy! I’m Gwynedd, Sporked’s managing editor. I live in Los Angeles and have access to the best tacos the U.S. has to offer—but I’m a sucker for a crunchy Old El Paso taco night every now and then. I’ve been at Sporked since 2022 and I’m still searching frozen mozzarella sticks that can hold a candle to restaurant sticks. Why you should trust me: I’ve been a journalist for 20 years (yikes), a consumer of food for 40-plus years, and I’m truly hard pressed to think of foods I don’t like (or that I can’t tolerate at the very least). Oh and one time I cooked my way through Guy Fieri’s cookbook and wrote about the journey through Flavortown. What I buy every week: Trader Joe’s Original Savory Thins. Fat free plain yogurt (usually Fage or Nancy’s). Honeycrisp apples. Sweet cream coffee creamer for my at-home Americanos. A frozen cauliflower crust pizza and some jarred mushrooms to top it with. Old El Paso Stand ‘N Stuff taco shells and Gardein Ground Be’f, even though I think “be’f” is a nightmarish contraction. Favorite ranking: Stouffer’s frozen dinners. I don’t own a microwave (I get my cancers the old fashioned way!), so I love taste testing things that I don’t really buy to eat at home. Least favorite ranking: Soy sauce. Don’t get me wrong, I love soy sauce—but consuming that much sodium in one sitting is probably illegal in some countries. Our frozen enchilada taste test was a close second; the smell of microwaved corn tortillas still haunts me.