Recently I wrote a piece on baked beans that came down on a fairly clean side of the argument: Asda’s own-brand at 42p was, by every metric the labels show, every bit as good as Heinz at £1.38, and arguably a touch healthier. If you’d been buying Heinz on autopilot, the beans piece said, switch — you’re flushing money down the sink.
This week’s article isn’t going to be that simple. And that, it turns out, is the whole point.
When I started looking at cream of chicken soup, I expected a carbon-copy result. Heinz at the top, Asda at the bottom, a satisfying “save your money” verdict, job done. What I actually found was something more interesting and, for shoppers, more useful: own-brand is not a level playing field, and the cheapest tin is not always the best buy at the price. Sometimes the supermarket you’d associate with “premium” has quietly matched the bargain price — and produced something genuinely better in the process.
Strap in. This one has a twist.
The shelf: three tins, two of them at the same surprising price
Here’s what cream of chicken soup looks like on the shelf today (April 2026):
- Heinz Cream of Chicken Soup, 400g — £0.94 per tin (sold only as a 4-pack at £3.75 in Asda — that’s £2.34 per kilogram)
- Asda Cream of Chicken Soup, 400g — £0.60 (£1.50 per kilogram)
- M&S Cream of Chicken Soup, 400g — £0.60 (£1.50 per kilogram)
Yes, you read that right. M&S has price-matched Asda. The supermarket synonymous with “this is not just food, this is M&S food” is now selling a tin of cream of chicken for sixty pence — exactly the same as Asda’s own-brand. I bought my first tin a few weeks back at 67p and thought that was already a steal; finding it dropped to 60p this week genuinely made me sit up.
It also means the question “which one is the best value?” stops being interesting. Both 60p tins cost the same. The interesting question is now: which 60p tin is actually better?
A quiet word about Heinz’s pack-size move
Before we get to the taste test, a small editorial detour. When I went to Asda to buy a single Heinz tin for the comparison, I couldn’t find one — at least not in the 400g size we all remember. Heinz’s 400g cream of chicken is now sold only in 4-, 6- and 8-packs at Asda. The single tin Heinz still offers there is the smaller 290g version (£1.64, or roughly £1.25 each on the “any 4 for £5” deal).
It’s a clever move. Multipacks make the per-tin price look sharper (£0.94 sounds reasonable next to a £1.64 small tin), and they ease shoppers into stocking up rather than spot-buying. But it does mean if you genuinely want one Heinz tin of the proper 400g size from Asda, your options are: buy four, or buy a smaller one for nearly the same money. Neither feels like a great choice.
For the like-for-like comparison below, I’m using the per-tin price from the 4-pack (94p) and the per-100g nutrition from the official 4-pack label.
The taste test: where things get interesting
I have eaten all three of these soups. Here is the honest verdict.
Asda at 60p: Disappointing. Watery, thin, distinctly synthetic on the back end. The kind of soup where you finish the bowl wondering whether you should have just had toast. I won’t be putting it back in my basket. Whatever Asda did right with their baked beans, they have not repeated here.
Heinz at 94p: Heinz. Exactly Heinz. Creamy, slightly salty, comforting in that childhood-tray-on-your-knees way. There’s a reason this has been a national pantry staple for decades. It does what it says on the tin.
M&S at 60p: Genuinely surprised me. Properly creamy, real chicken flavour rather than the synthetic suggestion of it, and a depth on the finish that Asda simply does not have. If you served M&S blind to a Heinz loyalist, I doubt they’d be unhappy. It is, dare I say, a Heinz “taste-a-like” — at the Asda price. The M&S customer reviews say the same thing without me prompting them: “as good as the leading brand,” “maybe even more so than the ‘main’ soup brand,” “definitely a convert.”
So there’s the headline already, and we haven’t even looked at the labels. Same price, two very different soups. Which raises the obvious question: what’s actually in them?
The numbers: per 100g, side by side
Once again, Heinz’s figures are “as sold,” Asda’s are “hob-heated,” M&S’s are “as sold.” Hob-heating concentrates values slightly as water evaporates, so Asda’s numbers will read a touch higher than they would if measured directly from the tin. It’s a small caveat, not a huge one.
| Per 100g | Heinz 400g | Asda 400g | M&S 400g |
|---|---|---|---|
| Energy (kcal) | 53 | 54 | 60 |
| Fat | 3.0g | 3.1g | 3.4g |
| Saturates | 0.4g | 0.6g | 0.7g |
| Sugars | 1.2g | <0.5g | 0.6g |
| Fibre | 0.1g | <0.5g | 0.5g |
| Protein | 1.6g | 1.5g | 2.3g |
| Salt | 0.6g | 0.50g | 0.55g |
| Chicken content | 3% | 3% | 3% (cooked breast) |
| Cream | not specified | 0.7% double cream | 1.5% double cream |
A few things leap out.
M&S has by far the most protein — 2.3g per 100g, against Heinz’s 1.6g and Asda’s 1.5g. That is roughly 50% more protein in the M&S tin than in either of the other two. It isn’t a rounding error; it’s a meaningful difference in a soup that is meant to be sustaining.
M&S has the most cream. 1.5% double cream against Asda’s 0.7% — more than twice as much. Heinz lists “Cream (Milk)” in the recipe but doesn’t quantify it, so we can’t compare like-for-like, but the M&S figure stands well above Asda. That single ingredient probably explains, more than anything else, the gap between Asda’s “thin and synthetic” and M&S’s “properly creamy.”
Asda has the lowest salt at 0.50g per 100g, with M&S at 0.55g and Heinz at 0.60g. So Asda does win on something — but if the soup itself doesn’t taste of much, that nutritional tick is cold comfort.
Heinz has remarkably little fibre — 0.1g per 100g. Effectively zero. M&S at 0.5g leads the table, modest as that is.
M&S has slightly more calories and fat, and that is the trade-off for the extra cream and chicken. If you’re calorie-counting it’s worth knowing, but in the context of a 200g serving (half a can) you’re talking about 14 extra calories. It’s not the kind of difference that should drive your choice.
The ingredients lists: where the real story lives
This is where the M&S verdict crystallises. Let me line them up.
Heinz: Water, Chicken (3%), Modified Cornflour, Rapeseed Oil, Cream (Milk), Dried Skimmed Milk, Wheat Flour (contains Calcium, Iron, Niacin, Thiamin), Flavourings, Milk Proteins, Cornflour, Salt, Yeast Extracts, Onion Extract, Stabiliser — Polyphosphates and Sodium Phosphates, Garlic Salt, Spice Extracts, Colour — Beta-Carotene.
Asda: Water, Modified Maize Starch, Chicken (3%), Rapeseed Oil, Fortified Wheat Flour, Whey Protein (Milk), Chicken Fat, Double Cream (Milk) (0.7%), Flavourings, Salt, Yeast Extract, Onion Powder, Garlic Powder, Ground White Pepper, Colour (Carotenes), Garlic Extract.
M&S: Water, Cornflour, Cooked Chicken Breast (3%), Double Cream (Milk) (1.5%), Rapeseed Oil, Roast Chicken Stock (Water, Salt, Chicken, Chicken Bones, Yeast Extract, Cornflour, Ground White Pepper, Ground Fennel Seeds, Bay Leaves, Parsley, Garlic, Onions, Leeks, Carrots), Whey Protein (Milk), Chicken Fat, Wheatflour (with Calcium, Iron, Niacin, Thiamin), Yeast Extract, Flavouring, Salt, Dried Onions, Ground White Pepper, Caramelised Sugar, Dried Garlic.
Read those one more time. Three things become impossible to miss.
One: M&S specifies cooked chicken breast. Heinz and Asda just say “chicken” — which under food labelling rules can mean any cut, including mechanically-recovered material. M&S has put their hand up and said “this is breast, and we cooked it before it went in.” That’s a meaningful step up.
Two: M&S uses an actual chicken stock, with a full sub-recipe of bay leaves, parsley, fennel seeds, garlic, onions, leeks and carrots. That is a proper layered flavour base — the kind you’d expect from a recipe on a Sunday afternoon. Heinz and Asda achieve their “chicken-y” character largely through unspecified “Flavourings.” Whether that bothers you is a personal choice, but it does explain the difference your tongue is reporting.
Three: only Heinz contains polyphosphate stabilisers. Polyphosphates (E450) and sodium phosphates (E339) are commonly used in processed meat and dairy products to retain moisture and stabilise emulsions. They’re approved as safe in normal use, but recent nutritional research has flagged that high cumulative phosphate intake may have effects on kidney function and bone health, particularly in people with existing kidney concerns. None of this means a tin of Heinz soup is bad for you. It is, however, a noticeable difference between Heinz and the two own-brand tins, and worth knowing about.
All three contain milk and wheat. None of them is suitable for vegans.
So why does Asda’s soup taste worse?
This is the question the labels actually answer. The Asda recipe leans heavily on modified maize starch (which thickens cheaply but gives a slightly gluey texture), uses less than half the cream of M&S, and reaches for “Flavourings” rather than a real stock for its chicken character. It has been engineered to a price — and at 60p, it is doing exactly what it was designed to do.
The trick M&S has pulled is to sell at the same engineered-to-a-price tag while putting more cream, more identifiable chicken and a proper stock into the recipe. How they make that work commercially is a matter for their accountants. As a shopper, you simply have to know it is there.
The verdict
Here is how I’d write this one as a shopping rule.
Best for taste at the price: M&S, no question. Same 60p as Asda, but in a different league. If you have access to M&S — online with Ocado, or in a Foodhall — buy it. While it’s at 60p, frankly, buy several.
Best for “I want exactly the Heinz I remember”: Heinz, of course. There is a reason it has dominated this category for decades. If nostalgia is what you’re paying for, that’s a perfectly defensible reason — but you are paying 56% more per tin than M&S for it, with phosphate stabilisers and less cream in the bowl.
Worth a look at the price: Honestly, no. The Asda tin disappointed me. At 60p I expected a serviceable alternative and got something thin. There may well be a better day for Asda’s chicken soup recipe — own-brand recipes are reformulated regularly — but on today’s tin I cannot recommend it. Stick with the Asda baked beans (which remain an unbeatable buy) and walk past the soup aisle for now.
For my money, M&S wins this round comfortably. At the price they’re now charging it’s worth stocking the cupboard up while the price holds. Soup doesn’t go off in a hurry, and 60p tins of genuinely good cream of chicken don’t tend to stay 60p forever.
Make the trip worthwhile
A small practical note here, because this is rather the point of what we’re doing. M&S isn’t usually somewhere you’d nip into for a single tin of anything — Asda is closer, the parking is easier, and one 60p tin will not justify the journey. The whole logic of these comparisons changes when you treat them as stock-up opportunities.
If you’re already heading to a Foodhall for the weekly shop, drop six tins of M&S cream of chicken into the basket. £3.60 spent, half a winter’s worth of comfort lunches sorted, and every one of them better than what you’d have got from Asda at the same per-tin price. Online with Ocado, it’s even easier: bump the order, hit the minimum spend in the process, and the soup pays for itself in convenience.
That, in a sentence, is the practical point of this series. We’re not saying “drive across town for a tin of soup.” We’re saying: when there’s a genuine bargain on something good, we’ll flag it so you can fold it into a trip you were making anyway. Watch the column for the deals worth a slight detour and the pricing windows worth jumping on.
Why we’re doing this — and what we’d like from you
Beans, soup, and whatever we test next: the lesson stacking up is that shopping own-brand isn’t a single decision. It’s a category-by-category one. With baked beans, Asda’s own-brand is the clear winner on price and on the nutrition panel. With cream of chicken soup, Asda’s tin is forgettable but M&S — at the same price — is excellent. Tomorrow it might be a Sainsbury’s pasta sauce, a Lidl cheese or a Co-op breakfast cereal that quietly outperforms the household name nobody questions.
This is what we’d like to do at Lincoln.Life: do the legwork on these head-to-head comparisons so you don’t have to. Which means we’d love to hear from you.
What would you like us to test next? A breakfast cereal? A frozen pizza? A specific brand of jam, ketchup, peanut butter, instant coffee, washing-up liquid, ground coffee, custard, fish fingers? If you’ve got a hunch — “I always buy Brand X but I’ve heard the Brand Y own-brand is actually better” — that’s exactly the sort of thing we’d love to put on the kitchen counter, taste-test honestly, and report back on. Comment below, drop us a line, or catch us in the usual places.
Until then: try the M&S cream of chicken. And if you’ve already stocked up, slip a tin into a neighbour’s shopping bag. At 60p, you can afford to be generous.
Prices and nutrition figures checked on asda.com and marksandspencer.com (via Ocado), April 2026. Supermarket prices change weekly; the M&S price-match in particular is worth confirming at the till.