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Healthy Home Economist / Archives / Healthy Living / The Do’s and Don’ts of Buying Bone Broth

The Do’s and Don’ts of Buying Bone Broth

by Sarah Pope / Affiliate Links ✔

Table of Contents[Hide][Show]
  • Buying Bone Broth vs Making It Yourself
  • Commercial Bone Broth+−
    • Little to No Gelatin
    • Dicey Packaging
  • Buying Bone Broth: What We Ended Up Doing

buy bone broth

My oldest child recently went off to college – nearly 1000 miles away from home. Obviously, given this distance, he wasn’t going to be coming home for dinner or visit regularly on weekends! One of my biggest challenges with this life change was to help him figure out how to stay healthy. Eating in the college cafeteria and living in the first-year dorms without an easily accessible kitchen presents a unique set of obstacles.

Since bone broth is a crucial component of traditional diet and staying well in general, the possibility of buying bone broth as a substitute for homemade is the first task I tackled.

Buying Bone Broth vs Making It Yourself

When I first embarked on the adventure of Traditional Diet in 2002, my biggest challenge was making everything myself. There were no commercial substitutes for pretty much anything.

I had to make my own kombucha, beet kvass, and other fermented drinks, make my own sourdough bread, sprout and soak beans, nuts and seeds, and the list goes on and on.

It was exhausting!

Needless to say, I was over the moon when artisanal producers started coming out with traditional foods that I could buy. While this option was more expensive, I readjusted the food budget to accommodate some of these items. I knew I was going to go crazy trying to do everything myself 24/7/365 for two decades until my children were all grown.

Remember, traditional societies not only ate ancestral foods but enjoyed the support of an entire community. A mother was not making everything herself all the time. Large numbers of extended family surrounded her as a critical support structure.

With literally no family nearby to help, I considered these small producers to be my modern-day support structure. I needed their quality products to combine with my efforts in the kitchen to round out the meals that I served my family.

Commercial Bone Broth

Fake broths and soups including bouillon cubes at the store typically consist of nothing but water, MSG, additives and a lot of sodium. This includes organic brands. These options clearly aren’t a good substitute for homemade bone broth. But what about the many small companies that are now making truly authentic stocks and broths? Are they good enough to use at home or for making nondairy homemade baby formula?

I examined all the brands of bone broth I could get my hands on, and here’s what I found.

Little to No Gelatin

Probably my biggest disappointment is that commercially made bone broth contains little to no gelatin. Putting the containers in the refrigerator did nothing to firm up the broth into the familiar jiggly blob you get when making it at home. Every brand I tested stayed liquid, indicating one of two things:

  • The bone broth was made with mostly bones and not enough meat to generate sufficient beneficial gelatin  -OR-
  • The bone broth was watered down before packaging

I should add that the organic deli at my locally owned health food store offers commercially made bone broth that properly firms up to a semi-solid state in the refrigerator. Talking with the store manager, the broth is made with whole chickens, which explains why the broth has so much gelatin. Enough meat is used along with the bones in the proper ratio to generate large amounts of gelatin. Obviously, I buy a lot of this bone broth to supplement my homemade stock. We use 1-2 gallons each week for our family.

Unfortunately, this type of deli isn’t available where my son is going to college. So, I continued my search for a quality commercial bone broth to buy.

Dicey Packaging

My second concern with commercial bone broth is the packaging. Most are packaged in some sort of plastic or cartons lined with plastic.

Commercial packaging using plastic containers or liners typically involves hot food coming into contact with the plastic. This has the very real potential to leech toxins into the food. Organic UHT milk is one such product. The milk is boiling hot when it is poured into the carton and then vacuum sealed to make it shelf-stable without refrigeration. Bone broth involves a similar process from what I’ve gathered talking with packaging experts.

The exceptions to this include bone broth that is properly cooled to room temperature before packaging in plastic. This would require that the broth be frozen before shipping. Such exposure to plastic in this scenario would present little to no leaching risk. But, frozen bone broth lacks the convenience of shelf stability. It also requires shipping in coolers with much wasteful packaging, which isn’t an environmentally-friendly choice.

Another acceptable packaging option is, of course, glass. Unfortunately, glass presents the danger of breakage.

What to do now?

Buying Bone Broth: What We Ended Up Doing

In the end, if you simply don’t have time to make your own or are in a location without kitchen access, it is definitely worth it to buy bone broth. This traditional food is simply too important to do without!

After trying numerous brands and carefully vetting the packaging processes used, I settled on Epic Bone Broth for my son’s dorm room which comes in shelf-stable glass jars.

The jars are shelf-stable for about 6 months but need to be refrigerated once opened. I purchased 2 cases (6 jars per case) to get him started when he moved into the dorm.

He has a cordless electric kettle in his dorm room for heating (faster and safer than a microwave!). However, he discovered that he prefers just opening a jar and drinking it at room temperature. This saves the hassle of cleaning the kettle each time. He stores leftovers in his compact refrigerator, which I made sure had an ample freezer for his healthy frozen soups from Bonafide Provisions.

It’s a convenient way to stay healthy at college!

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Category: Healthy Living
Sarah Pope

Sarah Pope MGA has been a Health and Nutrition Educator since 2002. She is a summa cum laude graduate in Economics from Furman University and holds a Master’s degree from the University of Pennsylvania.

She is the author of three books: Amazon #1 bestseller Get Your Fats Straight, Traditional Remedies for Modern Families, and Living Green in an Artificial World.

Her four eBooks Good Diet…Bad Diet, Real Food Fermentation, Ketonomics, and Ancestrally Inspired Dairy-Free Recipes are available for complimentary download via Healthy Home Plus.

Her mission is dedicated to helping families effectively incorporate the principles of ancestral diets within the modern household. She is a sought after lecturer around the world for conferences, summits, and podcasts.

Sarah was awarded Activist of the Year in 2010 at the International Wise Traditions Conference, subsequently serving on the Board of Directors of the nutrition nonprofit the Weston A. Price Foundation for seven years.

Her work has been covered by numerous independent and major media including USA Today, ABC, and NBC among many others.

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Reader Interactions

Comments (30)

  1. Monique

    Oct 10, 2018 at 4:03 pm

    You mentioned a deli at your local healthfood store makes a good bone broth, but you did not say the name of the store. I’d like to know the name of it in case there is one near where I live

    Reply
    • Sarah

      Oct 10, 2018 at 10:50 pm

      It’s a small locally owned healthfood store, not a national chain.

  2. Shelly

    Sep 9, 2017 at 9:23 am

    Broth recipe, directions. Please

    Reply
    • Sarah

      Sep 9, 2017 at 3:46 pm

      This bone broth recipe is linked to at the beginning of the article. https://www.thehealthyhomeeconomist.com/video-traditional-stocks-and-soups/

  3. Vicki

    Sep 8, 2017 at 8:14 am

    Fond bone broth out of Texas is excellent. Their flavors are the bomb. Check them out. Glass Jars.

    Reply
  4. Amanda

    Sep 7, 2017 at 3:01 pm

    Thank you for this review. I was starting to get skeptical as well when I started seeing bone broth packages appear all over the grocery store aisles. I have yet to taste Epic’s broth, but I bought it precicesly because it came in a glass jar.
    Question: Based on the previous comment with Carrie, is it possible to dry bone broth with a home food dehydrator?

    Reply
    • Sarah

      Sep 7, 2017 at 5:14 pm

      I haven’t tried it myself so don’t know for sure. I think others have done it. I simply cook it down to a fumee and that works well. Even if you dehydrate it, it will need refrigeration or freezing anyway so I personally don’t see the effort to do that being worth it.

  5. pam

    Sep 7, 2017 at 9:55 am

    never thought about chicken head. probably would add more minerals. i don’t know even know where to get it. (i’ll look next time in the farmer’s market)

    Reply
  6. Susan

    Sep 6, 2017 at 11:12 pm

    A good quality gelatin powder along with Celtic sea salt would provide a lot of the same benefits of bone broth.

    Reply
  7. pam

    Sep 1, 2017 at 7:39 pm

    i usually use chicken feet.
    strange you’d say to need some muscle meat, cause my home made broth always gels.
    but i agree commercial broth is very watery & never gels.

    + they often contain too much other flavors (like celery, carrot, onion) which may clash with the dish. (i prefer broth to tastes more neutral so only add some vinegar & sometimes ginger)

    cheers

    Reply
    • Sarah

      Sep 1, 2017 at 7:57 pm

      Yes, chicken feed and chicken heads work great to add gelatin to broth. There’s meat in those feet 🙂

  8. Elizabeth S

    Sep 1, 2017 at 10:57 am

    Thanks for the heads up on the Epic bone broth in glass jars! Great way to stock the pantry at home, and not fill up limited freezer space.
    Usually I make bone broth in a VitaClay (the big one with the silicone plugs in the lid) by just putting bones, some are meaty, from past dinners (chicken, beef, and pork, defrosted first) in for about 9 hours. The bones come almost to the top, and I fill it with water to the max fill line and let it slow cook (checking to be sure too much water doesn’t evaporate.) At the end there isn’t much liquid, (maybe 1.5 quarts) but it is a very firm gel. A bonus is that if some of bones were from a seasoned dish (such as sesame chicken), the broth is extra delicious.

    Reply
    • Sarah

      Sep 1, 2017 at 11:00 am

      Yes, I use the large Vita-Clay too! If any of you are interested in them (they make a stoneware one too that is gorgeous), use coupon code WISE25 to get 10% off whichever model you like best. Making broth in this appliance is much safer than stainless steel or the Instapot which has the potential for leeching nickel from the broth’s acidity.

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