Bare Bones Review: Worthy Broth?

Welcome to our Bare Bones review!

Born of an overworked chef’s (aren’t they all?) desire to stay healthy and sane, Bare Bones offers several varieties of bone broth, from classic beef and chicken to instant packets you can take on the go.

But every year at Natural Products Expo East and West, it seems like the broth booths consume a larger portion of the venue hall—so why should we highlight yet another one?

After asking co-founder Katherine Harvey ourselves, personally testing their products, and plenty of behind-the-scenes snooping around, we realized that Bare Bones has put a unique stamp on the industry with a nutrient-dense, highly flavorful selection that covers multiple use cases and convenient product types.

We award Bare Bones and their broths an overall rating of A-. This review exposes everything you need to know about them, from the ingredient quality to their customer service response.

Bare Bones Broth Pros and Cons

Born In the Kitchen: How Bare Bones Began

Head chef or busboy, fancy restaurant or chain, anyone who has worked in “the industry” knows how crazy it can be, this writer included.

Such was the environment that Bare Bones co-founder Ryan found himself steeped in while cooking at a fine dining establishment in San Diego, though unlike many chefs, he was not content with wolfing down unhealthy foods between shifts.

It was actually his habit of sipping broth in the kitchen that sustained him in a healthier and still-convenient way, and he liked the taste. 

Eventually, co-founder Ryan’s passion for the nutritious, easy meal inspired him to create a chef-quality stock for home cooks to enjoy.

It also helped that, in the early planning and development stages of Bare Bones, a celebrity chef in New York began selling bone broth for $9 per cup. This provided the context and the confidence the founders needed to launch the brand.

“We were at the right spot at the right time,” Kate said, alluding to the early success of Bare Bones that provided the foundation for more products, retail distribution, and other milestones.

That just about brings us to today, when a growing selection of Bare Bones broth (instant, classic, and low sodium) and ready-to-eat soup is available both on their website and plenty of shops across the US.

Speaking of the products, we’ll start our review off with a much closer look at ingredients and more, as always.

Our Bare Bones Review

We use the following criteria when reviewing brands (Bare Bones scores included):

• Quality (A)
• Transparency (A-)
• Website Experience (A)
• Customer Service (B+)
• Value (B+)
• Brand Value (B+)

Some areas of strength include superior ingredient quality and a smooth website browsing/shopping experience, with room for improvement on the value front and some other areas.

Overall, Bare Bones receives a rating of A-. Now for the review!

Quality

Starting with the first hands-on impression—the packaging—Bare Bones products come in different containers according to the category. 

The Classic Bone Broth, Low-Sodium Bone Broth, and Ready-to-Eat Soups come in pouches, while the Instant Bone Broth comes in single-use packets. The pouches use steam pressure to protect the contents.

“We pioneered the spouted pouch as a form factor for consumers, and instant bone broth to take on the go,” Kate explained to us.

From the spouts on the pouches to the actually easy-to-use perforations on the instant packets, the packaging was durable and practical.

As for the ingredients themselves, Bare Bones rides top standards, offering USDA Organic, non-GMO, and gluten-free certified ingredient lists featuring a wide variety of spices, vegetables, and of course, your protein sources (grass-fed beef, etc.).

For example, here’s the ingredient list for the Organic Chicken Bone Broth:

Water, Chicken Bone Broth* (Chicken Bones*, Chicken Feet*, Chicken Necks*, Onions*, Carrots*, Celery*, Apple Cider Vinegar*, Spices*), Chicken Broth*, Vegetable Base (Water, Garlic*, Scallions*, Mushroom Powder* Tomato Paste*, Spices*, Ginger Juice*, Turmeric*, Citric Acid), Gelatin, Sea Salt. *Organic

As you can see, there are zero sketchy preservatives, cheap fillers, or otherwise undesirable ingredients to worry about. 

Each 16-ounce pouch of the Organic Chicken Bone Broth contains 20 grams of protein, 540 milligrams of sodium, and zero added sugars or total carbs. 

Taking the entire Bare Bones catalog into account, they source pasture-raised chicken, grass-fed beef, and mostly organic vegetables and spices. 

They work with US-based contract manufacturers, headquartered mostly in the Midwest, with the exception of a warehouse in California for the wholesale aspect of the business.

Overall, our review leaves us with very little question as to the quality of the ingredients, certification standards, and manufacturing, though we save some credit for brands with more immediate oversight of the supply chain.

This brings us to a quality rating of A.

Bare Bones Product Catalog

Available in single-use, 15-gram packets, Bare Bones Instant Bone Broth products come in a variety of flavors, including Beef, Chicken, Ramen, Lemon Ginger, Mushroom, and Thai Coconut.

Simply mix the packet into 8 ounces of hot water, and you can sip them straight or integrate them into a recipe.

Classic Bone Broth

These are the cold-filled, steam-pressure-preserved pouches we were talking about, filled with ready-to-cook broth.

Available flavors include Beef, Chicken, Rosemary & Lemon, and Turkey.

Low-Sodium Bone Broth

This selection comes in the same format as the classic broths.

Depending on which flavor you’re comparing, the low-sodium version contains around 60% less. 

For example, the sodium content is reduced from 540mg a package to 250mg in the case of the Low-Sodium Beef Broth.

Speaking of, these are available in either beef or chicken flavors.

Ready-To-Eat Soup

If you’re a one-step kind of home chef (we vibe), you can try one of Bare Bones’ several Ready-To-Eat soups, which come in the following varieties:

• Tomato Chickpea
• “Cheesy” Broccoli
• Buffalo Cauliflower
• Lentil Curry

Transparency

While we don’t require essay-length spreads covering all the logistical and technical details, as both reviewers and customers, we expect each brand’s website to provide easy access to basic info—who they are, what they do, and how they do it.

The Bare Bones site provides personalized and fairly comprehensive biographies on each of the founders in addition to bios (with pictures) of six key team members.

As for product details, both the product pages on the website and the packaging provide a complete description of the basic specs—ingredients, prep instructions, etc.—as well as a number of informational blurbs about their unique packaging, processing, and other insights.

Information on where the ingredients are sourced from and where and/or how they are manufactured, however, is sparse throughout the website. 

Kate was forthcoming with these points in our interview, but more exposition on the website would be a welcome addition for customers who like to do their research.

Finally, fine print items like shipping/return policies were all clearly disclosed between the FAQ and Happiness Guarantee pages.

Taking into account the website, the products themselves, and our interview, we land on an A- for transparency.

Website Experience

More important than the aesthetic for our purposes—though we still factor it in—is how easy it is to learn about, browse, and purchase products on each brand’s website.

Hovering over the shop link on the Bare Bones site reveals their four major categories—Instant Bone Broth, Classic Bone Broth, Low-Sodium Bone Broth, and Ready-to-Eat Soup—making it easy to jump into any given product category with one click from the homepage.

As mentioned, the product pages are informative and well-designed, providing quick access to product information, usage instructions, background on the company, and more.

As for the browsing and shopping experience, adding products to cart is simple, thanks to a panel that slides onto the screen from the right sidebar displaying your cart (and your progress towards the free shipping minimum).

The site displayed and functioned just as smoothly on mobile devices as on desktop, with no formatting and/or functionality issues that we noticed.

Finally, though the recipes and the product pages themselves provide a decent surface-level knowledge base, a beginner-friendly intro to the benefits and uses of bone broth would be a welcome addition.

All points considered, the Bare Bones site is an informative and practical one, earning them an A for website experience.

Customer Service

Bare Bones offers text and email support services, both of which we tested.

We don’t automatically dock a customer service department for not having phone support, but it does make the response time more important for whatever other services they offer.

On that note, the Bare Bones email support response to our question was personalized, accommodating, and fast, arriving within an hour. 

However, the text response never came. Granted, we were “that guy,” sending our question towards the end of the afternoon on Friday, but it’s a ghosting nonetheless.

On the policy side, Bare Bones quotes a 5-7 business day window for shipping times, with 3-day expedited shipping available. 

Standard shipping is free for orders of $50 or more.

The refund policy, or should we say, the Happiness Guarantee, provides a 30-day window for customers to request a full refund. 

The refund applies to first-time orders only, which makes sense—we’d rather have this than be required to return products in their original packaging. 

Overall, Bare Bones performed well across the board with the one glaring exception of the texting situation, earning a B+ for customer service.

Value

How do Bare Bones prices compare against competitors, and is the quality worth the price?

As usual, it’s difficult, given the variance in ingredients, quantities, and other factors, to make apples-to-apples comparisons, but they can still provide context.

Here’s how Bare Bones Classic Bone Broth stacks up against other brands on a per-ounce basis:

• Bare Bones—$0.61/oz
• Kettle & Fire—$0.38/oz
• Swanson— $0.12/oz
• Dr. Kellyann’s—$0.90/oz

Generally, it’s rare to see prices go much lower than $0.12/oz or much higher than $0.90/oz, so this selection just about covers the entire spectrum when it comes to price alone.

Kettle and Fire comes pretty close to Bare Bones on the ingredient quality front, offering clean and mostly organic ingredients, though they don’t have quite as many vegetables and spices.

On the other hand, Swanson Chicken Stock has no organic ingredients, and does not disclose what exactly goes into the stock itself.

Finally, Dr. KellyAnn’s is comparable in ingredient quality and protein content, beating Bare Bones on collagen content specifically.

Taking both the quality and price of competitors into account, we consider Bare Bones to be within the more expensive third of the spectrum, but certainly not at the very top price-wise.

Also, the Gluten-free, Whole 30, and non-GMO certifications help justify the premium price, and the instant packets add an extra layer of convenience.

Balancing strengths and weaknesses in the value department, we arrive at a B+ for Bare Bones. 

Brand Value

Each brand has its own unique way of impacting its industry and any outside communities, but in general, we look for innovation, sustainability and philanthropy contributions, industry disruption, and more.

The cold-filled, steam-pressurized pouches, as well as Bare Bones’ instant broth products, are definitely worth some innovation points, and elevating the portability factor counts for industry disruption as well.

Bare Bones donates products to food pantries in New York, and have personally volunteered to fill boxes given to needy families. 

Their pro-sustainability efforts aren’t quite as strong as most high-quality brands we’ve reviewed, but BPA-free and recyclable packaging is a strong start.

Finally, the products themselves help to elevate the state of public nutrition by providing nutritionally dense, clean alternatives to unhealthy stocks and soups. 

The product donations boost this impact by providing families who would otherwise struggle to afford the products with an opportunity to have highly nutritious broth.

For these reasons, we award Bare Bones with a B+ for brand value.

Our Experience

Our team sampled the Classic Grass-Fed Beef Bone Broth as well as the Instant Chicken and Instant Beef broths. 

The Classic Grass-Fed Beef Bone Broth was easy to open, pour, and cook—just dump it in a pot and heat it up.

We were expecting the need for a dash of salt when sipping it straight, as has been the case with every broth brand we’ve tested in this way, but this particular beef broth was considerably less plain than even the high-priced alternatives we’ve tried.

It could still do with a pinch of salt, mind you, but it wasn’t screaming for it, and the broader selection of vegetables and spices than most was evident in the full-bodied flavor.

It was savory and satisfying, yet still thin enough to sip down without feeling overwhelmed—a definitively positive experience overall. 

The same goes for the Instant Chicken Bone Broth, which we actually liked more when it comes to flavor.

As for other aspects of the user experience, the powder dissolved easily enough to be stirred gently into a smaller cup of hot water without any clumps. 

We have yet to make soup with it, but as a standalone drink, Bare Bones has entered the ranks of our favorite bone broths to sip on with or between meals. 

Bone Broth FAQ

Key Takeaways

Bare Bones was among the first brands to offer gluten-free, non-GMO, paleo bone broth in instant form, also pioneering their cold-filled, steam-pressurized broth pouches.

Each ingredient list is loaded with organic vegetables, protein sources, and spices, with no harmful preservatives or fillers.

The Bare Bones website is welcoming and easy to use, though more transparency on the sourcing and manufacturing side would be helpful.

Their products are on the more expensive side, but not without partial justification on the quality (and taste) end.

Bare Bones earns an overall rating of A- in our review; we recommend their broth for anyone who wants a clean, nutrient-rich option they can have at home or on the go.