Frozen Chicken Pot Pies Ranked From Worst To Best

When a bowl of soup isn't enough to get you through a chilly night, there's no better meal than a savory chicken pot pie. They're not difficult to make — a 30-minute chicken pot pie isn't unheard of, and there are no fancy ingredients involved — but they do take some planning ahead, and that's not often how comfort food works. When the craving strikes, we want it now. Enter the frozen chicken pot pie.

Frozen chicken pot pies are more often sold as individual servings rather than the big beauties that may grace the family table, and that's telling of the real reason we're reaching for them more often than just those chilly nights. They're just so convenient! And that's true in every season. A rich, homemade chicken pot pie does sound better in fall or winter, but a frozen chicken pot pie is appealing as an afternoon snack in summer or an easy dinner in spring, too. When it comes to shopping for them, it may once have been as simple as opening your grocer's freezer, but today you may find more than a dozen options from competing brands to added flavor varieties. To bring you a proper rating, we tested a dozen popular varieties after baking them in the oven. All can be microwaved, but we wanted to sample each at its best, and that means properly baked. From serious misses to an undeniable standout, here are 12 popular frozen chicken pot pies ranked from worst to best.

A seemingly snazzier budget offering from Banquet, the chicken and broccoli pot pie sounds like an interesting way to switch up pot pie night, but you might want to think twice before tossing this one in your basket at the grocery store. While the addition of broccoli sounds delicious, and even healthier, you won't find much broccoli within a single pie, and the pieces you do find are relatively flavorless. There's certainly no additional broccoli flavor swimming about in the gravy, and Banquet actually eliminates peas and potato in order to sub in the broccoli, so you're left with fewer veggies and less flavor overall.

It's also worth noting that the budget options do ring up for less than half the price of the more upscale pot pies in supermarket freezers, but you should pay attention to what you're getting for that bargain before you make your choice. In Banquet pot pies, for example, the meat comes from chicken roll and mechanically separated meat, which is re-formed chicken shaped from a slurry. As with any other product in any market, you get what you pay for with frozen chicken pot pies, so if ingredient quality and nutrition matter in the moment, read the boxes carefully. The real reason Banquet frozen foods are so cheap is because they're not always the foods you thought you thought you were eating.

It's not often that the photo on the front of a food product undersells its most advertised ingredient, but Marie Callender's cheesy chicken & bacon pot pie is an exception. Yes, there's broccoli inside, and yes, there's bacon inside, but oh boy is there cheese inside. And not just the pleasant dribble or orange delight you see on the box. There's so much cheese inside this pie that it oozes out at every opportunity. That could be a good or bad thing, depending on your current craving.

If you're desperate for a brick of melted cheese and want to make yourself feel better by pretending you're eating some meat and vegetables with it, pop this in the oven. If you're actually hoping to taste some chicken or veggies, this is not the pot pie for you. The chicken and veggies are in there. Somewhere. But all you're going to taste is the cheddar, and you're not going to see much of anything else either unless you're really on the lookout. It's difficult for the crust to stand up to all this hot cheese (don't try to remove this one from the paper baking bowl before serving). Again, this is a cheese lover's delight, but we're not sure why you'd spring for this box if that's all you were looking for. There's not much of a legitimate chicken pot pie about this product.

Hopefully, you noticed the quirky spelling of chick'n in this product's name. If you're a vegetarian, we're sure you did because you're used to seeing the names of meats manipulated every which way to indicate that they're not really meat. And such is the case with this, the only truly vegetarian chicken pot pie on our list. Marie Callender's chick'n pot pie uses Gardein plant-based meat in place of genuine chicken, and fills the rest of the pie with the traditional carrots and peas, adding celery and onion pieces, too.

A word of caution for the casual vegetarians and meat reductionists. If you're not accustomed to meat substitutes, you aren't likely to love chick'n at first bite. Unlike seemingly every other random meat on the planet, chick'n does not taste like chicken, and the texture is substantially different from any bite of real chicken you've ever had. You are likely to be somewhat put off by this meat alternative if this pot pie is your first introduction to it. Conversely, there's not much of it within the pie, so you could easily avoid it. But then, why would you buy this individual portion? For vegetarians, however, we applaud this inclusion in Marie Callender's frozen pot pie lineup, and do think it deserves some points for making a very non-vegetarian dish accessible to a wider audience.

Marie Callender's has a pretty solid stronghold on the frozen pot pie market, so you're likely to find more innovations from this brand than others at your local supermarket. Among the pot pies on our list that are still firmly in the chicken category, this creamy mushroom chicken pot pie offers the most creative adaptation of the classic chicken pot pie without leaving behind any important elements. You really have to love mushrooms to love this pie, though, and mushrooms aren't universal favorites, so we've placed it toward the middle of our ranking since its primary flavor profile is likely to be somewhat divisive.

Like any good chicken pot pie, this gravy is truly creamy, creamier than most frozen pot pie gravies, in fact. And, while you'll still find carrot chunks in this one, it swaps peas in favor of green beans, which complement the mushrooms better by ditching the subtle sweetness of the pea for the earthiness of the bean. Solid mushrooms are enhanced by mushroom powder in the gravy, all adding up to a chicken pot pie that may help you feel like more of an adult while enjoying this instead of a classic pot pie, even if you did just grab this from the freezer and are eating it in bed.

Depending where you live, you may not be able to find these chicken pot pie bites because they are from the store brand of northeast grocery chain Shop Rite. But successful store brands are not all that different from each other, so chances are good you'll be able to come across something similar if you pop into a large supermarket near you. And because these are so different from traditional pot pie presentation, they're worth keeping an eye out for.

Rather than a single pie, chicken pot pie bites offer all the flavors of a chicken pot pie on a small puff pastry. While some appetizers of this size aren't often that good (especially ones from the freezer aisle), these are surprisingly pleasing. They truly offer the full flavor spectrum of chicken, veggies, and gravy, and the puff pastry adds a flaky crust that you just won't get from traditional frozen pot pies. At least if you cook them in the oven. Even better, they're easy to make — inside the box, they're arranged in an oven-safe plastic tray that goes right onto a baking sheet without requiring any individual handling. While they're definitely not stuffed with additional breading, popping an entire bite in your mouth does give the sensation of Thanksgiving stuffing on a pastry, and it's hard to get much more soul-warming than that. These are also great for a party.

As far as the classic chicken pot pie goes, the Boston Market chicken pot pie is the best you'll find in supermarket freezers. With big chunks of all-white meat chicken and the corn, carrots, and peas you're probably looking for, Boston Market includes celery and onions, too. That's almost every vegetable you'll find from all of the other classic chicken pot pies on this list combined, with the exception of potato cubes.

The gravy of this one is creamier than most, and that is likely due to the welcome addition of half and half to the chicken stock. Even if you somehow failed to detect all of these little upgrades, it's impossible not to notice this pot pie's superior crust. And not just because it's prettier than all the others — it's the only one that comes with a fun design around the rim, so it does score there, too. This pie crust is noticeably more flavorful. Despite being frozen, this crust manages to deliver an element of freshness and is simultaneously more savory and slightly sweeter than other brands' crusts, which nearly all come across as flavorless when compared to Boston Market's. At over an hour in the oven, this one takes longer to bake than all the others, but it's well worth the wait.