Vegetable Soup

Chunky vegetable soup is a familiar pantry staple across Australia — a ready-made meal in a can that needs nothing more than heating. Unlike smooth or puréed soups, the chunky style features visible, bite-sized pieces of vegetables like potato, carrot, celery, beans, corn, and tomato in a seasoned broth.

It serves as a quick lunch, a light dinner, or a warming snack on cold days, often paired with crusty bread or toast. The convenience of a canned soup that requires no preparation beyond opening and heating has made it a mainstay of Australian pantries for generations.

While homemade vegetable soup allows for fresher flavours and more control over ingredients, canned chunky soups offer reliability and a long shelf life. They are particularly handy for stocking the cupboard for busy weeks or as an easy fallback meal.

Produced
photograph to come — from twenty years of markets, farms and kitchens

How it's made

Fresh vegetables are washed, peeled, and diced into chunky pieces. They are combined with water or vegetable stock, seasonings, and sometimes thickeners like flour or starch, then cooked together in large batches. The hot soup is filled into steel cans, sealed, and retort-processed — heated under pressure to a temperature that sterilises the contents — giving the product a shelf life of several years without refrigeration.

Nutrition (per 100g)

Energy 39kcal
Protein 1.1g
Carbs 6.8g
Fat 0.4g
Fibre 1.1g Sugar 1.6g
Mass Distribution

1 cup is about 230 g — roughly 90 kcal of this.

What it costs the planet (per kilo)

Carbon ≈1.52kg
Freshwater ≈325.27L
Land ≈1.27m²

≈ Estimated — worked out from a category-typical value further up its supply chain. Where this comes from →

Where it comes from

In the kitchen

Used as

ready-to-eat vegetable soup

Goes well with
bread crackers cheese pasta sour cream
Classic dishes
  • Minestrone
  • Vegetable Soup
  • Garden Soup

Keeping one at home? Track yours in your cubud →

Where this data comes from

Nutrition data from

USDA

How it was calculated

SR Legacy

Full credits, licences, and methods: the sources page →

Where to next

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