Best Bone Broths

Note: We tasted one lot of each broth, as in we didn’t taste multiple containers of the same broth, although we did repurchase a few that smelled and tasted so awful they could have been spoiled despite the valid expiration date. The lesson learned here is that shelf-stable bone broths can and do go off before the expiration date. No tasters got sick, but some broths were very unpleasant to drink.

Bonafide Provisions’ bagged broth can be found in the freezer section of many grocery stores. This broth has a nice, light color, clean aroma, fresh flavor, and a very gelatinous body. (It’s the only one in our selection that gels up when cold.) It has a pleasant body when drinking and tastes like chicken bones. We like that there is no addition of vegetable stock so the bone broth can shine. And it has just enough salt to taste good on its own as a very simple sipping broth that you can season to taste, but not so much that it would overseason a soup. 

It’s the third most expensive broth we bought, at $11.29 for a 24-ounce bag, but it’s organic, high-quality, and contains only the ingredients we’d expect to find in a bone broth: ​​Chicken bones (including chicken feet), water, onion, garlic, sea salt, parsley, and apple cider vinegar, a common ingredient in bone broth that some say helps draw minerals out of the bones.

Epic Provisions’ bone broth comes in a 14-ounce glass jar, making it an ideal sipping broth. It’s pricey, at $8.29, so you wouldn’t want to stockpile this stuff as a soup base. It’s also got many flavors going on with added celery, carrots, turmeric, garlic, and rosemary, making it readymade and convenient to toss into a lunch bag—less so as a blank canvas to cook with. You can heat the jar in a microwave and chug away (though the label instructions say to pour it into a mug first). Unlike the Bonafide broth (above), Epic’s broth doesn’t gelatinize when chilled, so it might contain less collagen.

It has a lovely aroma that smells like bergamot and ginger. “It tastes like Thanksgiving,” says one taster, adding that she could drink this all day. “You can definitely taste the vegetables, too,” says another taster. “So you get a little more than just chicken broth, but you can still taste the chicken.” We all thought it was pleasant to drink and loved that it left us with lip-smacking collagen-coated lips.

Zoup Good, Really Good’s bone broth tastes better than it smells (you can smell the yeast extract), so we don’t recommend it as a sipping broth—when you’d have your nose in a mug of it. Its nutritional stats also read more like a regular stock, with fewer calories and protein than other bone broths. But it’s great as a full-bodied soup base, so long as you don’t add more salt. It’s already well-seasoned and tastes like a finished soup. All you really need to do is add some shredded rotisserie chicken, frozen vegetables, and maybe some fresh herbs. Keep jars of this stuff in the pantry in case you or a family member gets sick, and a cold-relieving chicken soup is only minutes away.

At $8.69 per 32-ounce jar, save the Zoup for soups that benefit from a hearty chicken flavor. For other soups and all other cooking applications, you can opt for the Swanson below, which costs less.

Swanson’s bone broth wasn’t the cheapest broth we bought—those two taste like actual garbage—but it’s the third cheapest, at $4.79 for a 32-ounce box. Judging by its color, smell, and taste, we would have bet stacks of cash that this was a higher-end broth, even though it doesn’t gelatinize when cold. The light broth has a pleasantly sweet aroma and tastes like chicken, but a couple of tasters noted a strong celery note, too. It’s a great wallet-friendly pick, but the bone broth is still pricier than Swanson’s chicken stock and chicken broth, both of which contain much less protein at 4 grams and 1 gram per serving, respectively. 

For those who like the convenience and storage-space-saving benefits of using bouillon cubes instead of broth, give this powdered broth a try. The individual packets are lightweight and packable, so you can take them on the road. The aroma is a bit like instant ramen seasoning, but it tastes better than it smells. 

Our only caveats are that this product (and the Zoup above) have natural flavors and yeast extract in the ingredients. Yeast extract acts similarly to monosodium glutamate (MSG) in that it adds umami, and it allows some manufacturers to reduce the salt in their recipes without compromising flavor. But it can also be a sneaky source of sodium if salt isn’t cut back, as in this case. If you’re pounding back bone broth daily, maybe choose one of our other picks that are made with only ingredients you’d find in your fridge or cupboard.

The regular LonoLife formula is insanely salty, packing 700 milligrams of sodium per serving. We recommend buying the reduced-sodium version, which has a more reasonable 230 milligrams of sodium (though we didn’t try it). The price is middle-of-the-road compared to all the others we bought—$6.99 for four packets, which make a cup of broth each.