Price: $3.29
Serving: 8 fl. oz.
Calories: 120 per serving
Fat: 2%, 2g
Cholesterol: 2%, 5mg
Sodium: 31%, 750mg
Protein: 3g
Carbohydrates: 7%, 20g
Fiber: 8%, 2g
Sugar: 6g
Weight Watchers Points: 2

Pacific Natural Foods says: The delicious taste of fresh picked sweet corn is blended together with black pepper and butter for a mouthwatering creamy new soup. Tastes like fresh corn right off the cob.

Davie says: Rhetorical question time! What vegetable says “summer” better than sweet corn? None, of course, especially if you’re from New York, like I am. Long Island sweet corn is some of the best you’ll taste in America. It is actually one of the few stomach-friendly things to sprout from Long Island during the summer—I mean, are you familiar with Ira Rennert and his Hamptons monstrosity?

In spite of it not actually being high season for the stuff yet, I’m starting to crave corn. Perhaps it’s my way of dealing with the impending temperature increase. (Gotta find SOMETHING about summer that makes me happy, after all.) And so today I pulled Pacific Natural Foods’ Buttery Sweet Corn Soup out of my pantry and got about snacking. I heated this up on the stove, but microwave directions are available as well (you have to heat it up in a nuking-appropriate bowl, not the box itself).

There are three major flavors working in this soup: sweet corn, “butter,” and pepper. The corn flavor is strong and tasty, and the pepper is more prominent than I expected it to be (not a problem for me personally). As for the butter flavor: it works, but according to the ingredients list, it comes from butter as well as “natural butter flavor.” The more I think about that “natural butter flavor,” the more I start to feel cheated by this “natural” soup. There are some other seemingly extraneous ingredients in it—nothing terribly offensive, mind you, but Imagine Organics makes a competitive product of more virtuous constitution that I’m inclined to try next. Too bad Imagine doesn’t package their soups with a convenient plastic flip-top the way Pacific does. I’m all about the flip-top making it easier to store your leftovers.

Anyway, what we have here is a solid B- of a soup that is creamy but not exactly thick. I’m not sure I would buy it again, but if you see it magically on sale, go for it. It would make a decent snack or buddy for a main dish—I’m thinking something like Trader Joe’s dee-lish vegan black bean & corn enchiladas.