Are Panera Soups Made Fresh In The Store?

Panera is a popular stop for a casual breakfast, lunch, or dinner when you are craving café mainstays like bagels, hot sandwiches, and flaky pastries. Its soup is a favorite, offering a hot, delicious hug to your stomach that hits the spot every time. In fact, said soup is so consistently yummy that you may have wondered if it's made in the store each day. Sadly, the answer is no – it's made off-site, frozen, and thawed in-store in hot water baths. 

Does using frozen soup seem like a restaurant red flag? It's actually not. In fact, it's pretty common in the industry for fast food and other quick-service restaurants that aren't expected to have a from-scratch menu. Frozen soup made in huge batches in commercial kitchens is a way to ensure consistency and quality, rather than having variances between chain locations. Furthermore, your average Panera probably has neither the manpower nor the storage to prep and cook all the soups on the menu and maintain a hot, fresh supply as customer demand fluctuates through the business day.

According to current and former Panera workers on social media, the fact that the company's soup comes frozen in blocks is news to most customers, who generally can't even tell — just like how many can't detect which Costco bakery items are made fresh. Cute tales of customers passing on compliments to the chef and being met with sheepish confessionals run rampant, with some Panera employees divulging that they were discouraged or even banned from admitting the soup wasn't freshly made!

At home, you might add flavor to lackluster soup with unexpected ingredients, but anyone who's sampled Panera's variety of soups can attest that most are pretty solid and don't require much improvement. Over on Foodie's sister site, The Takeout, a feature writer ranked Panera Bread's soups by best and worst, and found that, with the exception of French Onion, they all were quite serviceable for the price. Some choices, like the seasonal Vegetarian Autumn Squash Soup and good old Broccoli Cheddar, were actually rated as excellent. A writer for Business Insider had almost the same exact takes, disparaging the brothy French Onion and raving, "I was unduly impressed with Panera's broccoli-cheddar soup."

Given that Panera's in-cafe soups are frozen anyway, you shouldn't feel bad about picking up its refrigerated single-serving soups at your local supermarket. According to online employees, the soups you buy in the store are exactly the same as the ones at your grocer. If you already know that you enjoy Panera's wares, these little cups of soup might just earn a spot on your shopping list.

Static Media owns and operates Foodie and The Takeout.