In our Taste Test series, BA editors conduct blind comparisons to discover the best supermarket staples (like mayonnaise or frozen pizza). Today, which veggie burger should you grab from the freezer aisle?

There was a time when the mention of a veggie burger at a barbeque would elicit scoffs, but these days it’s a different story. Veggie burgers are a popular option as more people move towards a vegetarian diet, or simply one that includes less meat. And as they’ve become more mainstream, veggie burgers have become more delicious—craveable in their own right.

One of the first veggie burgers to see widespread success was created in London in 1982 by Gregory Sams, who also owned SEED, a pioneering vegetarian restaurant in the UK made famous by regulars John Lennon and Yoko Ono. Sams made his “VegeBurgers” from wheat gluten, sesame, soy, and oats, and they quickly became a success in grocery stores across the country. By the time he sold the company in the late ’80s, it was selling millions of veggie burgers per year. Fast forward to the early 2000s and companies like Boca Burger, Dr. Praeger’s, and Gardein were making veggie burgers readily available in supermarkets. Eventually fast food chains like Burger King and McDonald’s caught on as well.

Lukas Volger, author of the cookbook Veggie Burgers Every Which Way, has seen firsthand how the perception of veggie burgers has changed since he published the first edition of his cookbook in 2010. Whereas they used to be the domain of non-meat eaters, “they’re fully canonized now as a food item that a lot of people eat, whether they’re vegans, vegetarians, or omnivores,” he says. And that’s exactly why we set out to find the best veggie burger brand in our latest taste test.

How we picked the products

To put together the list of veggie burgers for our test, we started by asking the Bon Appétit staff for their preferred brands. From there, we reviewed other veggie burger taste tests to see what brands are typically covered and what gaps in coverage we could fill.

Veggie burgers come in several different varieties, but we focused on the “garden” or “California-style” veggie burgers, which are often made of beans, grains, and other legumes, sometimes with a melange of vegetable mix-ins for color and texture. We eliminated big-personality flavors that were singular to specific brands. MorningStar Farms, for example, makes a Spicy Black Bean Burger and a Tomato & Basil Pizza Burger, but we picked its Garden Veggie burger because it’s an everyday, gets-along-with-everyone option. Finally, we made sure each brand we tasted was sold nationally, so that it would be available to most readers regardless of location.

Where does plant-based meat fit into all of this? Vegetarian alternatives have exploded onto the grocery scene, but they serve a different purpose than the age-old veggie burger. Though some people consider fake meat burgers (like from Beyond Meat and Impossible Foods) to be veggie burgers, we see this as a subset, a category in itself. Plant-based-beef burgers are vegetarian, yes, but this genre of fake meat has a unique spectrum of ingredients, flavors, and textures.

How we set up our blind taste test

Most veggie burgers live in the freezer, so that’s exactly how we stored our contenders. When the time came to cook, we used a hot cast-iron skillet and a squirt of vegetable oil to promote browning and minimize sticking. We cooked each burger according to its package instructions, which broadly meant searing over medium heat for 10–15 minutes, flipping either halfway through or frequently. We adjusted as needed to make sure each burger crisped up handsomely. Each brand offers several cooking methods—such as stovetop, oven, and microwave—and we chose to prepare them all on the stovetop for consistency.