The 'Awful' Instant Soup Mix That Comes From A Surprisingly Beloved Name Brand

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Buying convenient foods shouldn't mean sacrificing flavor. That's why we've long praised the oeuvre of products by Bob's Red Mill, from its dessert baking mixes to its kaleidoscope of pancake mix flavors. It came as a surprise, then, that the company's Vegi Soup mix fell toward the bottom of the heap in our ranking of 16 instant soup brands.

Bob's Red Mill Vegi Soup is a bagged mixture of dried green split peas, yellow split peas, barley, lentils, and pasta. As we mentioned in our review, this "awful" soup mix fell flat for us and took an entire hour to cook on the stove (so much for "instant"). Once it was hydrated, the resulting time-suck soup was thin, sparse, and short on both veggies and flavor. Making matters worse, the product's "puke color made eating it genuinely unappealing" (ouch).

As the company's website notes, the soup mix arrives unseasoned to give home cooks maximum control and customization over the tasting profile of their bowlful. While it could be considered a plus to add your favorite herbs and spices into the pot, other higher-ranking products in our taste-test lineup (like Bear Creek minestrone soup mix and Mike's Mighty Good) performed well without needing to be doctored up. By our count, throwing in an armful of added ingredients is the only way to make this lackluster dry soup mix palatable.

We aren't alone in our take, either. Some of the negative reviews posted to the Bob's Red Mill website echo our feedback (via Target). One person complained, "Followed vegetable soup mix exactly and it was like cooked watered vegetables. Terrible needs flavor." Someone else remarked, "It's okay, I guess. I found it bland and uninteresting–just need to find something to perk it up more [...] not what I would call delicious, (So far this is the only one of Bob's products I haven't felt like raving about." Ultimately, the hearty combination of lentils and peas sounds like a solid, no-frills idea, but in execution, this bowlful misses the mark. 

Still, this isn't to say that Bob's Red Mill Vegi Soup is totally unredeemable. We might just call it a "soup base" instead of a complete soup. However, many folks on the Target website simply call it very good. Elsewhere online, Walmart customer reviews of the product herald it as a shelf-stable pantry staple for using up with a few added "carrots, celery, onion and whatever other veggie odds and ends we have kicking around the fridge or garden." A Reddit thread similarly recommends the soup mix as a vegan broth for making homemade vegetable soup loaded up with other fresh veggies. Indeed, if we were judging a lineup of soup base products, Bob's Vegi Soup might have some standing. Alas, in a ranking alongside other, more flavorful and fully ready-to-eat instant soup mixes, this one fails to deliver.