Trader Joe’s Beef Pho Soup Review

As good as you would expect from Frozen Pho

Stanley Wongus
2 min readDec 9, 2020

So I never knew Trader Joe’s sold food in Canada, or had their brand of food in Canada, but apparently, their Beef Pho Soup (frozen) is. It seems like just another regular frozen meal, but this one is soup-noodles based.

The Box

Overall, the box is pretty standard, but looks very nice. When opening it up, it was a standard mini plastic bowl with the food contents frozen in it.

It took around 6 minutes on the microwave, plus a few additional minutes of rest to let it slightly cool, since that’s how frozen microwave heating food works. And also a slit on the plastic top wrap before heating it up.

After removing it from the microwave, it looks like 10% of the cover. Quite watery, hot, and not a greatest amount of noodles, and the beef does not look too much like the really savory ones in the packaging.

When tasting it, it seemed like casual noodle beef and regular stuff. The serving proportions was smaller than anticipated, and I would say does not constitute as a full meal. The soup is not super savory, the overall broth is not super ‘pho-like’.

Some flavors were there, I could taste the slight spiciness from the jalapenos (not sure, pictured in the cover). The Pho noodles are not that nice compared to usual take out and stuff.

Overall, I would give this a 4/10. It’s still a decent food meal I guess, and some Pho elements are there. However, it is lacking many things that makes Pho, Pho, and yeah.

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