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Welcome to our Primal Kitchen No-Dairy Alfredo Sauce review!
Thin competition and a staunch adherence to top-notch ingredients helped this clean, dairy-free, paleo, and keto alfredo sauce by Primal Kitchen stand out.
It may not be a very accurate stand-in for classic alfredo, but our review team found this sauce to be tasty in its own right.
Especially when compared to the preservative-laced selections from supposedly high-end competitors (titanium dioxide, come on now), we found Primal Kitchen No-Dairy Alfredo Sauce to be the best retail-grade product in its category, giving it an overall rating of A.
If you’re looking for a much cleaner and more nutritious alternative to classic alfredo sauce, and you don’t mind going off the reservation a bit in terms of taste and texture, Primal Kitchen’s alfredo just might edge that jar of preservatives off your cupboard shelf for good.
Uncle Enzo may have a hand-gesture-filled rant at the thought of it, but for the rest of us, this avantgarde take on classic alfredo delivers a tasty and much cleaner alternative to the norm.
Water, Pumpkin Seed Butter, Avocado Oil, Organic Tapioca Starch, Roasted Garlic, Sea Salt, Onion Powder, Organic Lemon Juice Concentrate (adds a negligible amount of sugar), Black Pepper, Citric Acid, Nutritional Yeast.
Grade: A+
This ingredient list is a departure from the classic, but most definitely a welcome one on the nutrition front, leaving zero room for deduction thanks to natural/organic ingredients and a complete lack of harmful additives.
Here is the ingredient list for Primal Kitchen No-Dairy Alfredo Sauce:
Water, Pumpkin Seed Butter, Avocado Oil, Organic Tapioca Starch, Roasted Garlic, Sea Salt, Onion Powder, Organic Lemon Juice Concentrate (adds a negligible amount of sugar), Black Pepper, Citric Acid, Nutritional Yeast.
First of all, let’s not pretend it isn’t there—pumpkin seed butter.
From a nutritional perspective, pumpkin seed butter ranks high on the list of plant-based butters for its high nutritional density, delivering healthy amounts of magnesium, zinc, and other nutrients with fewer calories than most nut butters.
“But still,” you say, “it’s pumpkin seed butter in alfredo sauce.”
Rest assured, we’ll cover in detail just how the pumpkin seed butter impacted the flavor of our Primal Kitchen No-Dairy Alfredo Sauce in the “user experience” section below, so don’t worry (and to throw in a half-spoiler, it wasn’t what we thought).
Setting that aside for now, the rest of the ingredient list stays true to Primal Kitchen’s near-perfect nutritional and “cleanliness” standards.
The avocado oil, garlic, onion powder, pepper, nutritional yeast and lemon juice kick in a slew of nutrients to complement the pumpkin seed butter, and citric acid is definitively on the more benign side of preservatives.
For anyone not in the know, citric acid itself is naturally abundant in fruits and vegetables, but the citric acid we see on ingredient lists undergoes a manufacturing process using a fungus known as Aspergillus niger.
Still, this ingredient list contains zero red flags as far as harmful additives (citric acid has FDA GRAS status), including preservatives, sugar, and artificial sweeteners.
As such, it’s an A+ for ingredient and nutritional quality.
Grade: A-
A unique, citrusy taste makes this Primal Kitchen Non-Dairy Alfredo Sauce stand out, but the texture leans more towards gelatinous than creamy.
We can’t comment on the condition of our order on arrival, since we made the rare pilgrimage from our home offices to the grocery store (would you believe it?) in this case.
Still, the container, lid, and label were fully intact, and we had no issues with storing and reusing the product (going bad early, weird taste texture after refrigerating, etc.).
Taste and texture are a different animal altogether, however, and we’ve got a mixed bag of impressions that will either elicit a “how dare they!” or a “meh, who cares” depending on how much value you put in sticking to the classic alfredo taste and texture.
Our immediate impression—keeping in mind this is the first use, so the sauce had been neither refrigerated nor cooked—was that it was very sticky and gelatinous.
Once mixed with hot, freshly cooked pasta, this issue was resolved, yielding what actually ended up being an oilier and slightly thinner version of classic alfredo.
The taste was definitively different, involving a mild, but still surprising note of citrus (lemon juice) on the front end that gave way to more familiar waves of black pepper and garlic taste.
After a few spoonfuls, we grew fond of the taste, which might even pair better with chicken or shrimp—given the citrus element—than standard alfredo.
Homemade alfredo purists, however, will likely have a hard time appreciating this brazen departure from the norm, but as a reminder, this is a non-dairy, sugar-free, keto-certified, and paleo-certified alfredo sauce.
Overall, we enjoyed the sauce, but appreciating that some people likely will not, we’ve arrived at an A- for user experience.
Grade: A
Primal Kitchen maintains a pro-consumer approach to multiple facets of the brand experience, including their customer service, site content, shipping policies, and more.
This is where we step back from the individual product review for a second to evaluate the brand based on the overall experience they provide their customers, which includes several factors like:
There was no reason to contact Primal Kitchen customer service in this instance—sampling and reviewing their No-Dairy Alfredo Sauce—but we explain in our Primal Kitchen review that both the availability of services and the response time/quality were above average.
Primal Kitchen has email, live messenger, and phone support, all of which furnished quick and professional responses to our questions.
The online shopping experience is smooth and intuitive, thanks to drop-down menus displaying product categories, informative and well-designed product pages, and a “this much more to free shipping” meter discretely parked in the sidebar ($50 for subscribers, $25 for non-subscribers).
As for general site content, there’s certainly enough breadth and depth to allow for a decent understanding of who Primal Kitchen is and what they do—thanks in large part to their blog posts and podcasts—but the information is not clearly consolidated in a convenient, beginner-friendly way.
This along with their policy of not paying return shipping constitute our two complaints, which, when weighed against our otherwise positive experience, make for a fairly small deduction.
Taking all this into account, we award Primal Kitchen an A for brand experience.
Grade: A
Primal Kitchen’s normally B-range (for value) selection takes a refreshing turn in this case, as a more competitively priced option stands out against underwhelming competitors.
As usual, we’ll disclaim at the outset of our value assessment that we don’t put too much emphasis on apples-to-apples comparisons of products across brands, since there are too many variables (differing ingredient lists, use cases, manufacturing processes, etc.).
However, we can at least use the competition to provide a loose framework for assessing the value, so we took a look at four other alfredo products across the spectrum of quality.
Primal Kitchen charges $9.99 for their 15oz container of No-Dairy Alfredo Sauce, which reduces to (pun intended) roughly $0.67/oz.
Rao’s Homemade Alfredo Sauce is $8.99 for the 15oz container, reducing to $0.60/oz, but the mostly clean ingredient list is sullied by modified cornstarch, disodium phosphate, and other undesirable additives.
Victoria Vegan Alfredo Sauce, which falls short on ingredient quality (corn starch, xanthan gum, no organic ingredients), costs $0.72/oz.
Walden Farms non-dairy alfredo, which falls way short on ingredient quality (propylene glycol alginate, microcrystalline cellulose, titanium dioxide, and more) weighs in at an unmerited $0.87/oz.
Finally, removing our non-dairy requirement and abandoning pretty much any prospect of a healthier product, Prego Alfredo is $0.22/oz (you guessed it, subpar ingredients) and a half-step above that in both nutritional quality and price is Newman’s Own Alfredo at $0.23/oz.
We can’t deny that Primal Kitchen is still charging a premium, but these mitigating factors bumped their value grade up from the usual B range:
And just like that, Primal Kitchen has climbed out of B range and earned themselves an A for value in the case of their No-Dairy Alfredo Sauce.
Each jar of Primal Kitchen No-Dairy Alfredo Sauce has a “best by” date printed on it, and Primal Kitchen recommends refrigerating after opening and consuming the full product within 5 days.
Yes, Primal Kitchen Garlic Alfredo Sauce is gluten free (as is the No-Dairy Alfredo Sauce).
Yes, Primal Kitchen No-Dairy Alfredo Sauce is Keto Certified.
Primal Kitchen No-Dairy Alfredo Sauce managed to twist a conventionally unhealthy product into a vegan, paleo-certified, no-sugar-added option while beating the competition (by a huge margin) on ingredient quality, which is why this sauce deserves an overall grade of A.
Primal Kitchen No-Dairy Alfredo is more competitively priced than most of Primal Kitchen’s other products, and though we recognize their innovative reworking of the flavor and texture profile, those expecting a close copy of classic alfredo will likely be a bit miffed.
We recommend this alfredo sauce to any health-conscious Italophile who isn’t afraid of a new take on a classic sauce.
Uncle Enzo may have a hand-gesture-filled rant at the thought of it, but for the rest of us, this avantgarde take on classic alfredo delivers a tasty and much cleaner alternative to the norm.
Water, Pumpkin Seed Butter, Avocado Oil, Organic Tapioca Starch, Roasted Garlic, Sea Salt, Onion Powder, Organic Lemon Juice Concentrate (adds a negligible amount of sugar), Black Pepper, Citric Acid, Nutritional Yeast.
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