How many calories in soup? By tin, bowl and bread roll
Broth soups are 35 kcal per 100ml and cream soups are 85. Soup calories by tin and bowl, the condensed can trap, and why the bread roll usually beats the soup.
Soup is the least calorie-dense hot food in a supermarket and one of the most calorie-dense, and the two sit on the same shelf under the same word.
A tin of consomme is 8 kcal per 100ml. A tin of cream of mushroom is 85. That is more than a tenfold range in a product category where the packaging, the price, the serving suggestion and the shelf position are all identical.
And then there is the bread, which in most soup lunches is the bigger half of the meal.
The quick answer
Per 100ml, ready to eat.
| Soup | Calories per 100ml |
|---|---|
| Consomme or clear broth | 8 |
| Miso | 25 |
| Chicken noodle | 35 |
| Tom yum | 40 |
| Vegetable | 40 |
| Minestrone | 42 |
| Scotch broth | 45 |
| Carrot and coriander | 50 |
| Tomato, standard | 55 |
| Lentil | 55 |
| Chicken and mushroom | 60 |
| Pea and ham | 65 |
| Cream of tomato | 75 |
| Cream of chicken | 80 |
| Cream of mushroom | 85 |
| Cullen skink | 90 |
| Clam chowder | 90 |
| Bisque | 95 |
| Ramen, with noodles and pork | 110 |
| Laksa | 120 |
The false friend, and this one can be a 2.5x error
Most of the UK and US soup vocabulary is harmless. One item is not.
| Term | Means in the UK | Means in the US |
|---|---|---|
| A tin of soup | Ready to eat, 400g, tip it in a pan | Called a can, and often condensed |
| Condensed soup | Rare, clearly labelled | Common, needs an equal volume of water |
| Broth | Often Scotch broth, with barley and lamb | Thin clear stock |
| Chowder | Known, less common | A thick milk or cream soup, often clam |
| Cuppa Soup | An instant sachet in a mug | Nearest is an instant cup |
| Cream of tomato | The default tinned soup | Also common, usually condensed |
| Mulligatawny | An Anglo-Indian tinned staple | Rare |
| Crackers with soup | Unusual | Saltines, standard |
| A roll with soup | Standard | Less common |
| Stock cube | The dry cube | Bouillon cube |
| Coriander | The leaf, in carrot and coriander | Cilantro |
| Courgette soup | Common | Called zucchini soup |
The condensed line is the expensive one. An American can of condensed soup is roughly 150 to 190 kcal per 100g as it comes out of the can, because half the water has been removed. Diluted as directed it lands at 70 to 90, in line with everything else.
| Same can, logged two ways | Per 100g | Per 305g can |
|---|---|---|
| Condensed, as sold | 170 | 519 |
| Made up with an equal volume of water | 85 | 519 across 610g |
The calorie total does not change. What changes is that a British reader logging "100g of tomato soup" from a US database entry marked condensed will over-count by roughly 2.2 times. Check whether the entry says condensed, and if it does, check whether the figure is before or after water.
By vessel, which is how soup is actually eaten
Nobody eats 100ml of soup. Here is what the containers hold.
| Serving | Volume | Broth soup (40) | Tomato (55) | Cream soup (85) |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Cuppa Soup sachet, made up | 220ml | 60 | 60 | 60 |
| Small mug | 250ml | 100 | 138 | 213 |
| Standard bowl | 300ml | 120 | 165 | 255 |
| Half a 400g tin | 200ml | 80 | 110 | 170 |
| Whole 400g tin | 400ml | 160 | 220 | 340 |
| Restaurant starter bowl | 350ml | 140 | 193 | 298 |
| Fresh soup carton, half | 300ml | 120 | 165 | 255 |
| Fresh soup carton, whole | 600ml | 240 | 330 | 510 |
| Soup bar large | 500ml | 200 | 275 | 425 |
The fresh soup carton is the line worth pausing on. A UK 600g chilled soup carton is labelled as two servings and is very commonly eaten as one, because it is a single lunch-sized container that fits a single bowl. On a broth soup that is 240 kcal and harmless. On a spiced coconut or a cheese and leek it is over 500.
The bread is usually the bigger half
This is the finding that makes soup lunches worth writing about.
| Bread side | Weight | Calories |
|---|---|---|
| Nothing | 0g | 0 |
| 2 crackers or saltines | 12g | 55 |
| 1 slice medium white bread | 28g | 75 |
| 1 slice, buttered | 38g | 147 |
| 1 bakery roll | 60g | 170 |
| 1 bakery roll, buttered | 70g | 242 |
| 2 slices bakery sourdough | 120g | 324 |
| 2 slices garlic bread | 80g | 265 |
| Cheese toastie alongside | 1 | 552 |
Now the assembled lunch.
| Lunch | Soup | Bread | Total | Bread's share |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Bowl of vegetable soup, alone | 120 | 0 | 120 | 0% |
| With 2 crackers | 120 | 55 | 175 | 31% |
| With a slice of bread | 120 | 75 | 195 | 38% |
| With a buttered roll | 120 | 242 | 362 | 67% |
| With 2 slices buttered sourdough | 120 | 468 | 588 | 80% |
| Cream soup with a buttered roll | 255 | 242 | 497 | 49% |
| Soup and half a cheese toastie | 120 | 276 | 396 | 70% |
On a broth soup with a buttered bakery roll, two thirds of the meal is the bread. The soup was the decision. The roll came with it, or sat on the counter next to it, and it costs twice as much as the thing you ordered. The bread breakdown has the per-slice arithmetic if you want to pick a lighter side rather than skip it.
The soup preload evidence, and what it does not say
Soup has a genuinely good trial behind it, and the result is more interesting than the headline.
Sixty normal-weight men and women came to a laboratory for lunch once a week for five weeks. Each week they had one of four compulsory soup preloads or no preload, then ate a test meal freely fifteen minutes later. From Flood and Rolls (2007, Appetite):
- Consuming soup reduced total meal energy intake by 20%, an average of 134 kcal, compared with no soup. That is total, including the soup itself.
- The four forms tested were broth with the vegetables served separately, chunky vegetable soup, part-blended soup and fully pureed soup.
- The form made no significant difference. All four worked, and none beat the others.
The second point is the useful one, because the common belief runs the other way. People assume a chunky soup with things to chew is more filling than a smooth one, and that blending "turns it into a drink." In this trial it did not. Blended soup preloaded exactly as well as chunky.
What the trial does not show is that soup is magic. The soups were low in energy density. A 500 kcal laksa is not a preload, it is a meal, and nothing in that study suggests it would reduce anything.
The comparison with a salad preload is worth making. In a parallel trial on first-course salads, a low-density first course cut intake and a high-density one raised it. Soup behaves the same way. The mechanism is energy density and volume, not the food.
Homemade soup, and the two tablespoons of oil
Homemade soup is usually assumed to be lighter than tinned. It often is not, and the reason is always the same.
| Component of a 4-serving vegetable soup | Amount | Calories |
|---|---|---|
| Onion, carrot, celery, leek | 600g | 210 |
| Potato | 300g | 231 |
| Stock | 1.2L | 20 |
| Olive oil to sweat the vegetables | 2 tbsp | 248 |
| Double cream to finish | 100ml | 449 |
The oil is more than the onion, carrot, celery and leek combined. The cream, if it goes in, is more than everything else in the pot except the oil.
| Version | Total | Per 300ml bowl |
|---|---|---|
| Sweated in oil, finished with cream | 1,158 | 145 |
| Sweated in oil, no cream | 709 | 89 |
| Sweated in stock, no cream | 461 | 58 |
| Sweated in 1 tsp oil, no cream | 502 | 63 |
Sweating the vegetables in a splash of stock instead of oil takes a homemade soup from 89 to 58 kcal a bowl, and almost nobody can taste the difference in a soup that is going to be blended and seasoned. That is a bigger proportional saving than any tin swap available in a supermarket, and the olive oil breakdown explains why cooking oil is so consistently under-counted.
Salt, which is the real soup problem
| Product | Salt per serving | Share of a 6g day |
|---|---|---|
| Cuppa Soup sachet | 0.8g | 13% |
| Half a 400g tin | 1.0g | 17% |
| Whole 400g tin | 2.0g | 33% |
| Fresh chilled soup, 300ml | 1.2g | 20% |
| Restaurant bowl with bread | 2.6g | 43% |
| Instant ramen, whole pack | 4.5g | 75% |
A whole tin is a third of the day's salt in a 160 kcal lunch, which is an unusual ratio. UK guidance is no more than 6g a day for adults. If soup is a daily habit, reduced-salt tins are a better buy than reduced-calorie ones, for the same reason they are on baked beans.
Soup mistakes to avoid
Logging a condensed can as ready-to-eat soup
The largest single error available here, at roughly 2.2 times. Most food databases carry both entries and they look nearly identical in a search result. Check for the word condensed and check whether the figure is as-packaged or as-prepared.
Not logging the bread
Two thirds of a soup-and-roll lunch is the roll. It arrives with the soup, it feels like an accompaniment, and it is the meal.
Eating a two-serving carton as one serving
UK chilled soup cartons are 600g and labelled as two portions. They are shaped, priced and sold as one lunch. On a cream or coconut soup that is a 250 kcal misread.
Assuming chunky is more filling than smooth
The trial says otherwise, clearly. If you prefer chunky, eat chunky. Do not choose it believing it does more for appetite, and do not avoid blended soup on those grounds.
Treating instant noodles as soup
A pot of instant ramen is 110 kcal per 100ml with noodles in it, so a full pot is 350 to 500 kcal and three quarters of a day's salt. It is a noodle dish in broth, not a broth.
Adding cheese, cream or croutons to a soup you chose for being light
30g of grated cheddar is 125 kcal, a swirl of cream is 60, and a handful of croutons is 115. All three go on last, all three are invisible in the bowl, and together they are more than the soup.
Three soup lunches that hold up
The 175 kcal lunch that is genuinely a lunch
- 300ml vegetable or minestrone soup (120 kcal)
- 2 crackers rather than a roll (55 kcal)
Adds up to: 175 kcal. Thin, and honest about it. Its job is to be the low-density preload the trial describes, not to be dinner. If it is your whole lunch you will be hungry by three, which is the accurate criticism of soup as a meal.
The soup that is actually a meal (392 kcal)
- 400ml lentil soup, homemade, sweated in stock (232 kcal)
- 100g shredded chicken breast stirred in (165 kcal)
Adds up to: 397 kcal with 42g of protein and 9g of fibre. The reason most soup fails as lunch is that a bowl of vegetables in water has almost no protein in it. Adding a protein to the pot fixes it far better than adding bread to the side.
The tin, improved for free
- 400g tin of tomato soup (220 kcal)
- 80g tinned chickpeas, rinsed and stirred in (130 kcal)
- Black pepper, chilli flakes, a squeeze of lemon (0 kcal)
Adds up to: 350 kcal with 14g of protein and 8g of fibre, against 220 kcal and 4g of protein for the tin alone. Half a tin of chickpeas is the cheapest way to turn a soup into something that lasts until dinner, and it costs less than the bread roll it replaces.
The verdict
Broth soups are 35 to 55 kcal per 100ml and cream soups are 75 to 95. A standard 300ml bowl is 120 or 255 depending on which side of that line the tin sits, and the word that predicts it is "cream," not the vegetable on the front.
The bread is usually the bigger half. A buttered bakery roll is 242 calories next to a 120 calorie bowl, so two thirds of a classic soup lunch is the part that was never the decision.
Soup does work as a preload, by about 20% of total meal calories, and it works whether it is chunky or blended. What it does not do is work when it is a laksa.
Photograph the bowl and the bread together in Calow, not the bowl alone. Soup is the one meal where the item people log is reliably the smaller half of what is actually on the tray.
Pairs well with: high-volume, low-calorie foods, the baked beans breakdown, and how many calories are in a salad.