Proper Good's Pizza Soup Is An Improper Bowl Of Pizza

I shop at Aldi now and then to pick up a few household staples. I love Aldi for its cheap prices, but I also secretly love it for its limited-time product selection in the "aisle of shame," which can get pretty fun sometimes. One Aldi item I keep seeing pop up in my social media feeds lately is a curious prepackaged soup — it's not canned, nor is it refrigerated. Instead, it comes in a pouch, and it's inspired by a dish that you normally wouldn't associate with a spoon: pizza, of all things.

I keep seeing photos of people holding packages of this pizza soup from a company called Proper Goods, but all of the pictures I see only show the package, without anyone having mentioned they've actually tried it. So I decided to see if this stuff even existed. It was indeed in a shelf-stable bag at our local Aldi, and the bag was labeled with appeared to be an AI-generated (blech) image of a glistening slice of pepperoni pizza, dripping globs of molten cheese. It advertised a pepperoni, tomato, and cheese flavor, and because these flavors are always good on a properly baked crust, I wanted to see whether or not they'd work in soup format. 

For my methodology during this taste test, I would first start by preparing the soup as instructed on the package. Then I would judge it on taste and texture and then consider its individual components to see whether or not the product had any appeal on its own. I would also think about whether or not this soup actually tasted like pizza, and if not, what in particular it might be lacking.

Once the initial taste test was completed, I would decide to garnish the soup on my own using common pantry ingredients many people keep in their own homes — just because many people, like myself, like to doctor up their soups when eating them for a meal. I would judge that version too to see if it was improved, then draw my conclusions on Proper Good's pizza soup.

Proper Good's pizza soup is designed to be a convenient and microwaveable meal. You simply open the pouch and nuke it for 90 seconds and it's good to go. The pouch itself is unwieldy to eat out of, so I poured some into a ramekin for photography purposes (there's enough for a full bowl), and found that 90 seconds might have been a hair too short, as it ended up being closer to lukewarm than hot (my microwave's wattage is slightly on the low side, however).

My first spoonful revealed that this soup did not, in fact, taste like pizza. Instead, it tasted like a whole load of dried oregano, which was strong and bitter. The tomato portion was mostly sweet, with a muted cooked tomato flavor; there wasn't any true brightness to it, though there was some mild acidity. I couldn't detect any cheese, but I think there was enough dairy in the broth to temper the flavor of the tomato sauce. The pepperoni came in the form of small cubes. It had very little cured meat flavor; all it did was lend some processed stringiness to each mouthful of soup. I'm going to guess that the fat and salt actually leeched out of the meat during the cooking process, but unfortunately that meant the soup didn't really taste like pepperoni, either.

That's a lot of words to say that no, it didn't taste like pizza, and no, it wasn't great. Considering it costs $4.98 per pouch, I'm going to say it's a hard pass from me. Even if you catch it on markdown someday you may find it disappointing. 

I still had plenty of soup after my initial sampling, so I thought of some ways to potentially make this stuff better. Inspired by French onion soup, I thought I'd add some carbs and plenty of cheese. I tossed some croutons on top of the soup, sprinkled a ton of shredded mozzarella on that, and gave it a 10-minute whirl in my countertop oven.

Once the cheese was an ideal golden color, I pulled it out and gave it a go. Bingo — this was much better, and certainly more substantial, though it still didn't quite taste like pizza. The cheese and the croutons simply distracted me from the fact that the rest of the soup wasn't very good. I don't think I could eat a whole pouch of soup this way, but I could split a pouch of this with someone, eat it French onion-style with a salad, and call that a light lunch. Now that I knew this improvement worked, would I reconsider and and buy this now? Still, no. I'm sitting here writing, and all I can taste is that oregano. In fact, it's driving me crazy. Some viral things should just be left on the shelf — pizza soup is definitely one of them.