Discontinued Grocery Store Soups We'll Probably Never Eat Again

Canned soup, or carton soup, is straight-up taken for granted. Packaged soup is the most ordinary of foods, lining the shelves of every supermarket and so small, inexpensive, and easy to ship and stock that it's found in plenty of drug, convenience, and big-box stores, too. But canned and boxed soup is really a marvel of ingenuity and a relatively modern invention; the process started to get perfected in only the 19th century. The techniques by which soup is placed into and stored in cans and packages without refrigeration for months or even years were revolutionary, making it easier to preserve food and feed millions of people around the world.

In the 20th and 21st century, processed soup is still big business, and most anyone can find a variety of soup at their local supermarket to provide heat, nourishment, and nutrition. It's such big business that it's a cutthroat industry. The major soup manufacturers and store brand providers routinely do away with underperforming varieties to make way for new ones or just to avoid losing money. The loser in this situation: the loyal customers who very much enjoyed and appreciated those soups that disappeared. Here are all the most sorely missed soups once found in grocery stores around the United States, but not anymore and likely never again.

In the 2010s, the hottest kitchen appliance in years was the Keurig single-serving coffee maker. With the aid of specially made and approved K-Cups, the machine brewed a supposedly perfect cup of coffee (or tea, or hot chocolate) one at a time, individually. In 2015, Campbell's got in on the burgeoning K-Cup market while also helping Keurig market its brewers as useful for more than just beverages. The product: Fresh-Brewed Soup. It came in two varieties: Homestyle Chicken Broth & Noodle, and Southwest Style Chicken Broth & Noodle. It was even pitched as a low-calorie item — because an individually-made serving of the K-Cup soup was much smaller than that offered by a traditional can of soup.

It was arguably needlessly complicated, or at least more unnecessarily involved than dumping a can of soup and some water into a pot. Customers were expected to extract from a box of Campbell's Fresh-Brewed Soup a noodle pocket and a K-Cup full of dried broth. To make hot soup, one would empty the noodle and ingredients pack into a large cup and allow it to catch the runoff of sending the broth pod through the Keurig. While one can make a great soup by taking all the right shortcuts, not very many customers want to use their coffee makers for soup, and Campbell's got rid of Fresh-Brewed Soup less than a year after its launch, in 2016.

Soup, particularly canned soup prepared as directed, is almost categorically broth-heavy and light on ingredients, and in the 1960s Campbell's tried to reinvent the convenience food as a thick, calorically significant meal choice with Campbell's Stout Hearted Soups. The idea wasn't immediately successful, but it took off when it was rebranded as Campbell's Chunky in 1970, promoted with the TV ad tagline, "It's so chunky you'll be tempted to eat it with a fork." Packed into extra-big cans to hold the soups made with large meat chunks and big portions of vegetables, the line sold particularly well in the 1990s after Campbell's started hiring NFL players to star in commercials for Chunky Soup, branding it, "The soup that eats like a meal."

Numerous individual varieties of Chunky Soup have come and gone over the past 50-plus years. The original four flavors have all since been retired: Chunky Beef, Chunky Vegetable, Chunky Turkey, and Chunky Chicken. In the 2010s, Campbell's aggressively added new styles to the line and made space for them on the production line and on store shelves by getting rid of older flavors that didn't sell as well as they used to. In came Spicy Nashville-Style Hot Chicken and Texas-Style BBQ Burger, and out went Philly-Style Cheesesteak, and then Meatball Bustin' Sausage and Rigatoni. One of the longest-available Chunky Soups finally disappeared in 2023: Chunky Chicken Mushroom Chowder, part of the line since the mid-1970s.

Dinty Moore Beef Stew can trace its origins to the comics page. The name brand of budget canned stews and soups isn't a real person, but the name of a man who ran a diner in the early 20th century comic strip "Bringing Up Father," who served up corned beef and beef stew to the main character Jiggs. The strip was so popular that a chain of real-life Dinty Moore restaurants opened in New York City, and in 1935 Hormel skirted copyright laws and launched a line of canned goods under the same name.

"Bringing Up Father" kept running until 2000, but by then Dinty Moore soups had long since surpassed the comic in popularity and name recognition. As of 2024, Dinty Moore Beef Stew and Chicken & Dumplings remain in production. Another, soupier style sold in a similar red-and-white can as its brand-mates, Dinty Moore Meatball Stew, was available for decades. It was more or less the regular Dinty Moore Beef Stew, with soft potatoes, peas, and carrots in a brown broth, but with processed balls of ground meat used as the protein instead of pieces of whole beef. Hormel never found a significant audience for the Meatball Stew, and it stopped making it sometime after 2010.

Progresso is a company that isn't afraid to evolve. Starting out in Italy in the 19th century, Progresso canned Italian foods in the U.S. in the early 20th century and moved into soups by the 1940s, the first to pack split pea, lentil, and minestrone into metal cylinders. Pillsbury bought Progresso in 1969 and sold it to General Mills in 2001, by which point it was known as one of the most productive and familiar soup brands in the U.S. By 2020, Progresso was regularly manufacturing and distributing around 90 different kinds of canned soup, which company leaders decided was far too many.

In the early weeks of the COVID-19 pandemic, and as customers' shopping and eating habits rapidly changed, General Mills executives opted to immediately end production on 40 of the soups it identified as its poorest sellers. Gone immediately, and probably forever, in the name of cost-cutting and allocating resources to make the flavors customers really did want: Chicken and Orzo with Lemon, several versions of chicken noodle soup, Chicken Cheese Enchilada, and Green Pea.

Not as popular or as well-known among canned soup buyers as it once was, Pepper Pot was first sold in the vast Campbell's line in 1899. A spicy melange more like a stew than a soup, Pepper Pot was hot because of the inclusion of jalapeño peppers and red pepper flakes in the modern recipe, along with plenty of potatoes, onions, carrots, bacon, and beef tripe. Similar to any number of Campbell's beef-and-vegetable soups, Pepper Pot was different in that it was based on a specific, traditional recipe. That stew was a regional Philadelphia favorite where it took hold after being introduced by immigrants from the Caribbean and West Africa centuries ago.

Never reaching the ubiquity or sales of its other soups like Tomato or Chicken Noodle, Campbell's nevertheless kept Pepper Pot soup in production for well over 100 years. That product became one of the few mass-produced Caribbean foods in the United States. Demand for the item dwindled over the decades and by the 21st century it was such a low-seller that Campbell's decided to stop making and distributing it in 2011.

One of the first modern-day celebrity chefs, Wolfgang Puck found fame by helping to create fusion cuisine (melding old-fashioned French styles with West Coast and Asian elements) and to popularize California cuisine. His name carried a certain level of quality and expertise, and from 1997 on, it graced a line of canned soups produced by Country Gourmet Foods. An innovator in organic mass-produced products, Wolfgang Puck Organic Free Range Chicken Noodle Soup, safe to eat cold out of the can, became one of the line's top sellers, and within a decade on supermarket shelves, it propelled overall sales of $22 million.

In 2008, the household name in canned soup, Campbell's, purchased the Wolfgang Puck soup portfolio from Country Gourmet, as well as the right to license the celebrated chef's image and name on soup and soup-adjacent items. Instead, somewhere along the way, Campbell's shut down the entire Wolfgang Puck soup brand. As of 2024, it doesn't list any Wolfgang Puck soups on its website, and they aren't stocked by major retailers like Amazon and Walmart.

If a broth is a hot, salty, and savory liquid with no solid ingredients, then Scotch Broth isn't a broth. Falling somewhere in between a soup and a stew in terms of heartiness, Campbell's produced its own take on a dish dating back to 18th century Scotland sometimes known as Scotch barley broth. Traditionally made with beef or mutton, along with barley, peas, onions, and root vegetables, Campbell's version utilized lamb (similar to mutton), as well as barley and finely cubed potatoes and carrots all set inside of a mutton-based broth.

Scotch Broth was a niche item, as hinted by the extra "Special Selections" golden banner slapped onto the labels of the stuff produced in the 2010s. Around 2011, Campbell's stopped making, canning, and distributing Scotch Broth for the U.S. market. The company never publicly or widely confirmed that Scotch Broth was no longer in production. In 2023, a Campbell's customer looking for answers directly asked the soup company's customer service account on X, formerly known as Twitter. "This product has been discontinued. We don't like to discontinue items that may be a staple in your home," the Campbell's representative explained. "We sometimes discontinue certain items so we can focus our efforts on upcoming offerings."

Autumn is about making the most of butternut squash season, and it's easy to celebrate at Trader Joe's. Along with perennial private label favorites like Butternut Squash Mac and Cheese, Pumpkin Butternut Squash Bisque, and Butternut Squash Italian Lasagna, customers could almost always find many cartons of its Organic Butternut Squash Soup in the canned and packaged soup aisle. A Trader Joe's product to buy every time for some shoppers, the soup was smooth and creamy, more like a bisque than a soup and tasted like liquified butternut squash, all tangy and nutty. It was convenient, too: Diners simply poured out a portion into a bowl or pot and then heated it up and then refrigerated any leftovers in the carton it came in.

And yet by 2023, the Trader Joe's Organic Butternut Squash Soup started to disappear from stores nationwide, never to be restocked. Outsider company Pacific Foods is reportedly the supplier and manufacturer for many Trader Joe's soups, and a very similar organic butternut squash variety is distributed to major grocery outlets. But as for a Trader Joe's-branded and sold organic butternut squash soup, that simply doesn't exist anymore.

Cioppino is a classic of American seafood based cuisine. In the 1850s, Italian-American fishermen took whatever they couldn't sell of their daily haul, cut it up, and mixed it up with wine, garlic, onions, herbs, and tomatoes to create the hearty, varied seafood stew that takes its name from an Italian word that means "chopped" or "torn." A food-waste averse dish that's easily amenable but always packing the same Italian-inspired flavors and seafood heft, cioppino became a standard item at Italian and seafood restaurants around the country, and Trader Joe's for many years sold a frozen make-your-own cioppino kit that was as affordably priced as it was tasty.

A big bag of the heat-and-serve soup sold for just under $6, unbeatable for all that shrimp, cod, clams, and mussels. In 2022, Trader Joe's confirmed that the noted absence of its store-brand Cioppino Seafood Stew could be attributed to how the company had discontinued the item.

Through a program of house-branding and countless unique and inventive products marketed through fun in-store signage and its "Fearless Flyer" newsletter, Trader Joe's can easily build fervor for a new item that smoothes out into a loyal following. The funky, small-supermarket chain regularly rolls out so many new products that it has to get rid of old ones at just as rapid a clip, and that can even include items that it has stocked for years. By the mid-2010s, plastic tubs full of Trader Joe's version of gazpacho were a staple. Sold refrigerated and meant to be sold that way, it was a blend of tomatoes, citrus juice, garlic, peppers, and vinegar, based on the Andalusian classic chilled summer soup.

That soup didn't quite sell enough units for Trader Joe's to justify keeping it around, so it eliminated the original Gazpacho from its production lines and introduced Roasted Tomatillo Gazpacho. That didn't perform much better for the grocery store, and that one is currently no longer available from Trader Joe's either.

Pea soup is such a simple dish that it's not surprising it's ancient, with records of it being consumed in ancient Greece and Rome as far back as 500 B.C. Most modern versions are based on the one brought to the U.S. by French-Canadian mill-workers in the 19th century, including Campbell's Green Pea. That long available canned soup was a basic recipe and mild in flavor, combining split peas, water, butter, sugar, flour, and extracts of onion and celery. Campbell's kept selling enough of the stuff well into the 21st century, favored by vegetarians because it was one of the few mass-market pea soups that didn't also include pieces of ham.

And then Campbell's caught up with the industry standard. It introduced a new flavor of condensed soup in its iconic red-and-white cans: Split Pea, Ham, and Bacon. That seemed to push Green Pea out of production. At least when Campbell's discontinued its original formulation Green Pea soup, it recommended an alternative for customers. Campbell's Canadian branch oversees Habitant, which makes an old-fashioned French-Canadian-style pea soup, closer in style to the company's now disappeared Green Pea flavor.