Nearly 39% Said This Was The Best Soup At Panera Bread
We're well into soup season, so the time is ripe for a soup survey. Here's a not-so-hot take: Panera Bread's soups are good. A taste-tester at Insider sampled six of the fast casual's soups and had good things to say about all of them. Well, the only good things she could say about the ten vegetable soup was that it was "super healthy" and "brothy," but still...
Ex-model and cookbook author Chrissy Teigen is so fond of Panera Bread's broccoli cheddar soup she tweeted back in early 2018 that she thought it should be renamed "delicious cream times." (Panera kindly responded that it will refer to Chrissy Teigen as "best human in the twittersphere." We haven't checked in with Panera in 2021 to find out if they're still going with that.)
While Insider and Teigen both expressed one human's opinion about Panera's soups, we at Mashed took a more democratic approach. We asked 604 people in the U.S. to name Panera Bread's best soup. Inquiring minds want to know, would Chrissy Teigen agree?
The best Panera soup in our survey shouldn't surprise anyone
Before we give the rundown of our Panera Bread soup survey results, we'll note that Insider threw its readers a curveball by ranking the creamy tomato soup ahead of the broccoli cheddar. Creamy tomato won Insider writer Melina Glusac's heart with its "bold, delicious, near-perfect tomato flavor."
People responding to the Mashed survey were more in line with Chrissy Teigen on this topic. Broccoli cheddar was the clear winner among our 604 respondents, with 38.74% choosing what Teigen dubbed on Twitter "delicious cream times." Homestyle chicken noodle, a hearty, flavorful version of this grandma special, came in a distant but still-respectable second place, with 17.72% of the vote. The bistro french onion soup, which got a big upvote on Reddit from a Panera employee, was third at 12.42%. Insider's Glusac might be disappointed to learn that her favorite, creamy tomato, landed in fourth place in our survey, with 10.43% of the vote. Our respondents agreed with Glusac regarding ten vegetable, however, voting this soup dead last (5.46%).
We skipped the two-way tie for fifth place, for the sake of narrative flow, but we didn't forget about Panera Bread's cream of chicken & wild rice or its turkey chili. A mere 7.62% of those participating in our survey liked these soups. A Redditor described the turkey chili thusly: "It tasted like Taco Bell meat, but with turkey." The Redditor/Panera employee confirmed what Teigen and most of the rest of us suspected about the broccoli cheddar, saying it is "the most popular soup by far."