How to read a bone broth label
Share
Bone broth is a category where the front of the package tells you very little and the back tells you almost everything. Here is how to read the back.
One: read the ingredient list in order
Ingredients are listed by weight, most first. For a broth, water is going to be near the top and that is fine. What matters is what comes next.
You want to see actual animal parts and actual vegetables, named. Beef bones. Chicken feet. Carrots, celery, onion. Salt. Spices.
What you do not want is a short list that jumps straight from water to something that is not food: a concentrate, an extract, a flavouring. If the second ingredient is not something you could buy at a butcher or a greengrocer, the broth is built around something other than bones.
Two: look for what is missing
A good label is as interesting for its absences. Four things worth noticing when they appear.
Natural flavours. A legal catch-all. It can cover a great deal, and its presence in a product whose entire premise is simmered bones is a fair question to ask.
Yeast extract. A savoury booster. It makes thin broth taste meatier than it is.
Concentrate, or broth made from concentrate. Broth reduced down, shipped, and rehydrated elsewhere. Cheaper to move. Not the same thing as broth made and packed as broth.
Vinegar or citric acid. Usually there to speed extraction. We have written about why that does less than people think, and you can taste it in a broth you drink on its own.
Three: check protein against the serving size
This is where the category gets slippery.
Protein per serving only means something once you know how big the serving is. A label showing 9 g looks weaker than one showing 12 g until you notice the first is a 240 ml serving and the second is a 400 ml one.
So do the arithmetic. Find the serving size in millilitres, find the protein in grams, and compare like with like. It takes ten seconds and it reorders the shelf.
Ours, for the record. The frozen Grass-Fed Beef is 17 g of protein per 240 ml serving. The shelf-stable pouch is 11 g per 250 ml. The frozen Free Range Chicken is 10 g per 240 ml. Those are the numbers printed on the labels.
Four: collagen claims are not all the same
Collagen can get into a product two ways. It can come out of the bones over a long cook, or it can be added as a powder or isolate after the fact.
Both are collagen. They are not the same product. A label that says it contains collagen is not telling you which, and a label that lists a collagen powder in the ingredients has answered the question for you.
The kitchen test for the first kind is free: chill it overnight. Broth that sets pulled gelatin out of bones.
The thirty-second version
Turn it around. Read the ingredients in order and make sure the first few are food. Check for natural flavours, yeast extract, concentrate and acid. Divide the protein by the serving size. Then hold it up to the light, because a clear pour tells you how it was cooked.
That is the whole method, and it works on any brand, including ours.
Common questions
What should bone broth ingredients be?
Bones and meat, water, vegetables, salt and spices. Anything beyond that is worth a second look.
Is bone broth from concentrate bad?
It is a different product. Concentrate is cheaper to ship and store, and it is reconstituted rather than packed as it came out of the pot.
How much protein should bone broth have?
Compare per serving size rather than per package, since serving sizes vary widely across the category.
What does "natural flavours" mean on a bone broth label?
It is a broad regulatory category. On a product sold on the strength of simmered bones, it is reasonable to ask what it is doing there.