The Souper Bowl 2024: And the winner is…

Introducing The Souper Bowl 2024! It’s a soup smackdown. We’re hosting the ultimate showdown on our Instagram stories, and we need you to help us crown the best soup, ever. Every day, over the next five days, we’ll post match-ups where you can vote for your favourite. The winning soup will move to the next round and, as the week goes on, we’ll find our soup champion.

What you have to do:

At 3 pm every day, we’ll post the daily match-ups and all you have to do is vote for your favourite soups. Be sure to join every day otherwise, you won’t have your say in which soups move into the next round.

The technicalities:

This championship follows a simple NBA-style tournament model. We used Google Analytics, as well as TASTE’s own site statistics, to determine which soups are the most popular. The reason we also took TASTE’s stats into account is because we wanted to ensure local representation, something Google Analytics doesn’t always factor in. In keeping with the sports theme, we needed to determine a ranking so we used analytics again to order the soups from most to least popular. For the sports fans out there, you’ll recognise this as seeding. That list looked like this:

Chicken soup 
Butternut soup 
Veg soup 
Lentil soup 
Tomato soup 
Minestrone soup
Chicken noodle soup
Miso soup 
Wonton soup 
Gazpacho 
Broccoli soup 
Mushroom soup 
Split pea soup 
French onion soup 
Tom yum soup
Bone broth 
Black bean soup 
Beetroot soup 
Chicken-and-corn soup
Cabbage soup 
Cauliflower soup 
Leek-and-potato soup
Pea-and-ham soup 
Sweet potato soup 
Bisque
Oxtail soup 
Carrot soup 
Seafood chowder 
Corn chowder 
Fish soup 
Marrow bone samp soup 
Laksa

From here, we needed to build group stages. Using a tournament-style format like the NBA, tennis championships, or even the rugby World Cup, we used the seeds to do this. The seeds are important because you want to ensure a fair fight from the outset and that you don’t pit two heavy-hitters against one another too early on. That would be like the Springboks and the All Blacks facing one another in the first round of the group stages – bad! These soups were divided into four brackets, each containing 8 soups, and seeded according to their popularity. This means the most popular soups face the least popular in the first round, creating balanced match-ups.  Each group will have its own series of match-ups, starting with the first round, then moving to the quarter-finals, semi-finals, and finally a winner. The winners of each bracket will compete in the semi-finals and then in the grand final to determine the ultimate favourite soup.

The groups look like this:

Group A

Chicken soup
Corn chowder
Tomato soup
Bisque
Wonton soup
Cauliflower soup
Split pea soup
Black bean soup

Group B

Butternut soup
Fish soup
Minestrone soup
Oxtail soup
Gazpacho
Leek-and-potato soup
French onion soup
Beetroot soup

Group C

Vegetable soup
Marrow-bone samp soup
Chicken noodle soup
Carrot soup
Broccoli soup
Pea-and-ham soup
Tom yum soup
Chicken-and-corn soup

Group D

Lentil soup
Laksa
Miso soup
Seafood chowder
Mushroom
Sweet potato soup
Bone broth
Cabbage soup

And they will face off against one another like this, until we have our champion.

The schedule:

Monday 22 July

On Monday, round one kicked off with groups A and B facing off.

At the end of day one, the results are as follows:

Group A quarterfinalists:

Chicken soup
Tomato soup
Wonton soup
Split pea

Group B quarterfinalists:

Butternut
Oxtail
Leek-and-potato
French onion soup

Tuesday 23 July

On Tuesday, round one continued with groups C and D battling it out. At the end of day two, we knew which soups from each of the groups were going into the next round.

At the end of day two, the results are as follow:

Group C winners:

Vegetable
Chicken noodle
Pea-and-ham
Chicken-and-corn

Group D winners:

Lentil
Seafood chowder
Mushroom
Bone broth

Wednesday 24 July 

Wednesday, the group stages continued.

Group A
Chicken
Tomato

Group B
Butternut
Oxtail

Group C
Chicken & Corn
Chicken Noodle

Group D
Lentil
Seafood Chowder

Thursday 25 July

In the semi-final on Thursday, group A’s winner took on group B’s winner. The winner of group C also went against the winner of group D.

Group A
Chicken vs Butternut

Group B
Chicken Noodle vs Lentil

Friday 26 July

In the final, the two last soups went head to head to crown the winner:

Chicken vs Chicken Noodle

And the winner is...

Get the recipe for whole poached chicken soup here.