A King among soup ingredients?

It feels about the right time to crank out your Crockpot and to get slow cooking.

Along with casseroles, soups go down a treat and King traditional soup mixes are a popular addition to home-made soups.

King is owned by Wilson Foods Ltd, a New Zealand-owned marketing agency which also promotes international brands like Hershey’s. But although they market a lot of brands, it’s not clear where the products are actually made. Nonetheless, let’s see how King Soup Mix stacks up nutritionally.

The pumpkin and turmeric flavour sounds nice. Usually, the per 100g column is the go-to as it allows you to compare products.

But in this instance, similar products, like Maggi Soup mixes, make comparing complicated as they have analysed per 100ml, not a dry weight.

King soup has a net weight of 210g and the per 100g column represents dry weight. Around 26g of the King soup mix is intended to yield a 250ml serving for eight people. So, to work out what’s in the entire soup mix, either multiply the per 100g column by 2.1 or the per serve column by 8.

Per 250ml serve there is 5g of protein, next to no fat, and a total of 15.4g of carbs, of which 3.3g have been added. So, the protein equivalent to a small egg and just less than a teaspoon of added sugar. Unfortunately, dietary fibre is not listed, but the first ingredients – split yellow peas and red lentils – are naturally high in fibre, so hopefully there is some fibre present.

Remember, the Heart Foundation considers products over 600mg/100g to be high in sodium. There is 1340mg/100g and 351mg of sodium per serve of the soup mix. This works out to be to close to two teaspoons of table salt in the entire packet and under a quarter of a teaspoon per serve.

So, maybe not surprisingly, this soup mix is a high sodium product.

Comparatively, Maggi –

Pumpkin and Roasted Garlic dried soup, which has next to no protein, offers 1.5g of fat, 395mg of sodium, 9.8g of total carbohydrates of which 2.3g has been added.

Dietary fibre isn’t listed but it would be surprising if this product provided a good source of fibre.

So King Soup Mix appears to contain some protein, is low in fat, there is some added sugar and is a high sodium product.

If you are making this your next meal, include an additional source of protein, bulk it out with some fibrous foods i.e. vegetables, enjoy dipping some quality bread in it and note it doesn’t need salt added.