6 Amy's Kitchen Burritos, Ranked

Amy's Kitchen started with a vegetable pot pie in 1987. Now, the prepared-food giant clears $1 billion in annual sales across more than 250 products. Amy's still makes frozen pot pies, but the brand's array of prepared meals now includes everything from canned soup to frozen pizza to candy, and its long list of offerings has plenty of gluten- and dairy-free options, too. Given just how prolific Amy's has become, it's not surprising that frozen burritos are on its product list. But burritos are actually one of the brand's original prepared meals; along with mac and cheese, burritos were the premier products Amy's Kitchen made in its first commercial kitchen in 1991.

Now, 25 years later, Amy's burritos are still a frozen food aisle staple, and many of us who have tried eating organic or plant-based have had our fair share. But are they any good? I grabbed every Amy's Kitchen burrito my local grocery store had to try the brand's version of the Mexican wrap. I wanted to see which could transcend the challenges of frozen food to provide a burrito with well-balanced flavors and textures from each component. I sought out a savory, well-seasoned filling with a tortilla sturdy enough to keep things handheld. Here's what I found.

Amy's burritos don't exactly have a wild variety of flavors and ingredients. For most of the burritos on this list, the differences come down to cheese or no cheese, and pinto beans or black beans. But with the Southwestern-style burrito, Amy's took a swing at something a little different. The Southwestern Burrito features tomatoes, fire-roasted poblanos, jalapeños, Monterey Jack cheese, refried beans, corn masa, and black olives, all wrapped in a whole-wheat tortilla. I had high hopes indeed. But, unfortunately, this burrito sits at the bottom of the ranking.

To be clear, there is no bad burrito on this list. I'll make it known now that these are all affordable and genuinely tasty. But this one has some significant flaws. For one thing, the corn masa was formed into chunks that didn't seem to absorb any of the surrounding sauce, leaving them strangely firm. The black olive sounded weird to me, and it is indeed weird. The flavor feels out of place amongst the other ingredients. But the biggest issue was the consistency of the burrito filling. I expected the masa to be a textural ingredient that would act as a thickener, but the filling is positively soupy. I had to scrape it back into the wrap with a spoon, which is not something you ever want to have to do with a handheld food. It's delicious — smoky from the poblanos, creamy from the Jack cheese, earthy from the refried beans — but it's irredeemably wet.

The Bean and Cheese Burrito is, specifically, a cheddar cheese burrito. It also has pinto beans, veggies, and a mild sauce. The flavor is good, but the texture is more impressive. Cheese can be a tricky thing to freeze and thaw, even when integrated into a sauce, and there were no textural issues here. The sauce is creamy and well-seasoned, with hints of chili and cumin.

But with a somewhat homogeneous filling, this is more like refried beans in a tortilla than a true burrito. Tasty, but not what I was looking for. This is also the only burrito that had a serious structural breach. The tortilla was overly dry and split lengthwise during reheating, and while this is not exactly unexpected in the fraught world of frozen food, it is a real problem. Especially for foods meant to be handheld. Luckily, the filling was of a thick enough consistency that it didn't fall apart, as I suspect the Southwestern burrito would. But it did ooze out enough to burn my thumbs and make me sad.

Like the Southwestern Burrito, the Ranchero Breakfast Burrito is a little outside of the typical Amy's burrito repertoire. It's a flour tortilla filled with black beans, cheddar cheese, roasted potatoes, tofu scramble, and ranchero sauce. Ranchero sauce is a spicy tomato-based sauce best known for its prominent role in huevos rancheros, making it an ideal choice for a breakfast burrito.

This is a very solid frozen breakfast burrito. The tofu scramble is plentiful and fluffy. The potatoes add a slight bite and help add a little more structure to a pretty saucy interior. The cheddar cheese is rich and creamy, and the ranchero sauce adds a fiery, fresh note that provides a nice contrast to the potatoes and cheese. There are a lot of textural elements at play here that could go wrong, especially as a reheated-from-frozen product. Other than a bit of dryness in the tortilla, it all goes right.

All in all, I would definitely get this breakfast burrito again. I do wish that the ranchero sauce had been a touch spicier. And while this burrito didn't turn into a wet mess, as the Southwestern Burrito did, it does go a little too far in the saucy direction — napkins were a must. And I'd love to see this with an egg scramble instead of tofu, both to up the breakfast ante and to pair it with the ranchero sauce. But it has a variety of flavors and textures that the previous burritos do not.

I'm not a vegan, and I am not dairy-free. But as someone who likes to eat most things and never says no to the question, "Do you want to try some of this?" I've had my fair share of animal product substitutes. And these days, many substitutes do a fantastic job of mimicking everything from meat to yogurt. But one thing I have never had a good experience with is vegan cheese. Every time I give it a chance, I regret every oddly textured, greasy, off-tasting bite. So when it came time to try this Bean and Cheeze Burrito, I was worried. How could I reasonably rank something with non-dairy cheese in a burrito ranking? Would it inevitably be ranked last?

Well, as the reader and I both know by now, I did not have to worry. I was shocked by how similar this tasted to the dairy Bean and Cheese Burrito, and I wasn't just relying on memory; I tried them back-to-back. It is just as flavorful and creamy, with absolutely none of the waxy mouthfeel or plasticky aftertaste I've come to expect with plant-based cheese. Not only that, but I chose to rank it higher than the Bean and Cheese Burrito because the tortilla was less dry and the wrap held together better. It also had a less homogenous texture, making the bites more varied and burrito-like. Even a frozen burrito ranking can have gasp-inducing plot twists.

The Bean and Rice Burrito packaging is so forthcoming with its non-dairy nature that you might think it includes some kind of vegan substitute (see Bean and Cheeze). But it's more straightforward than that; it's a pinto bean, veggie, and brown rice burrito with no cheese. Quirks of Amy's advertising notwithstanding, this burrito is better defined by the addition of rice than the absence of dairy.

In fact, I wish more of the Amy's burrito lineup featured rice. It can be a somewhat controversial burrito ingredient, but I think it can be very useful as both a sponge for surrounding flavors and as a straightforwardly tasty starch. And, in the case of this burrito, the rice plays both roles. It absorbs the mild but well-seasoned, tomatoey sauce and brings its own nutty flavor. Plus, it keeps the filling from being overly saucy and provides a nice chew. 

To be sure, the distinctions between the burritos on this list are subtle; this burrito is not drastically different from the Bean and Cheeze Burrito it won out over. But I didn't miss the cheese (or vegan cheese) here, because this product balances the texture and flavor of each ingredient in a way that is more fitting for a burrito.

While I hadn't exactly made any concrete predictions, the Black Bean Burrito would never have been my guess for number one. For one thing, I wasn't exactly sure what made it different from the various other bean burritos until I took an extremely close look at each label (as an aside: Amy's, please give these burritos better names). For another, there's no cheese, and I am a big fan of cheese. But the Black Bean Burrito nails it with every component, even if it's not showy. 

The pieces of vegetables are slightly larger than in the other burritos — I could actually see the corn, broccoli, peppers, onion, and tomato — which adds a nice variety of textures, and the pieces aren't so big that they could get pulled out by a wayward bite. While the pinto bean burritos feel very bean-heavy, the black beans here are in balance with the other ingredients. There's no cheese in this burrito, but it makes for a more concentrated filling that is well balanced with the tortilla and isn't too moisture-filled to take on the go. It's lightly spicy and smoky with a punchy savoriness from the sauce. This burrito is great as-is, but I could also see myself adding all kinds of sauces and salsas on other occasions. Yes, I am already excitedly imagining myself eating this again; high praise for a frozen burrito.

I reviewed only Amy's products that had the term "burrito" in their labeling. Therefore, I did not test any similar Amy's products that are called "wraps." I also chose the burritos based on my local availability.

Each burrito was prepared according to the oven-reheating instructions on the outer packaging. While not all burritos were tested at the same time, some were tasted in back-to-back pairs, like the Bean and Cheese and the Bean and Cheeze, as their similarities suggested an especially close comparison.

Each burrito was evaluated based on the taste and texture of both the individual components and the holistic product. I also considered how well each product met the flavor profile, consistency, and structural expectations within the burrito category generally. Price, preparation method, and nutritional value were not evaluated in this review.