5 Pre-Sauced Grocery Store Ribs, Ranked From Worst To Best

Sam Zwick/Mashed

Cooking a good batch of barbecue ribs takes time. If you're smoking your ribs, you're looking at hours at a minimum, and even if you're just tossing a rack in the oven, low and slow is the way to go. Dedicating that much time to a single meal isn't always feasible, though, and thankfully, there are plenty of workarounds.

I visited several local grocery stores and came home with five different brands of pre-packaged ribs. Most were already fully cooked and swimming in barbecue sauce, requiring only a bit of time in the oven to warm up, while one took just over an hour to go from raw to steaming hot and ready to eat. I recently reviewed some of the best barbecue in the country during a trip to Kansas City, so I like to think I know at least a little bit about ribs. 

What I found in the grocery aisles was a mixed bag, ranging from middling meat hiding behind a gallon of sauce to shockingly tender ribs requiring very little work. Read on to find out which ribs are worthy of a spot on your table and which are best left behind.

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For just under $15, I snagged a 24-ounce package of Kingsford Baby Back Pork Ribs. That sounds like a decent deal until you do the per-ounce math and realize that at 62 cents per ounce, Kingsford is the most expensive rib on the list. Unfortunately, the quality can't justify the price point.

In addition to being on the smaller side, these ribs aren't very meaty. You're left scraping your teeth across bone for a few extra morsels before you even get a mouthful. The meat itself is fine; tender enough, but hardly falls off the bone. There's nothing remarkable about the meat's coloring or flavor, but it's hard to tell because the sticky-sweet sauce coating every inch of these ribs dominates the flavor. The sauce is thick, sweet, and quite good, but it's doing a lot of heavy lifting.

The cooking instructions for the oven are simple: Wrap the ribs in tinfoil and bake at 400 degrees Fahrenheit for 10 to 12 minutes until everything begins to brown. I'm not sure how you're supposed to tell if precooked meat and a dark sauce are "browning," so I went by temperature instead. Ultimately, Kingsford slaps a solid sauce on a subpar rack of ribs. Not surprising considering they're known for making grills and some pretty decent spices, but not meat products. My oven is manufactured by Whirlpool, but I'd probably avoid the Whirlpool Chicken Pot Pie, so you should do the same when it comes to the Kingsford ribs.

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This one hurts because Burgers' Smokehouse was so close and then they ruined these baby back ribs – not to be confused with spare ribs – in the most inconceivable way. First, let's look at the price. At 60 cents per ounce, these are the second priciest on the list, but also among the largest, thanks to a 36-ounce package. The already fully cooked meat only requires 15 to 20 minutes in the oven at 350 degrees Fahrenheit, though I left mine in a little longer to heat everything evenly.

The meat is good! It practically falls off the bone and has a nice pink color, indicating it's been properly smoked. So what's the problem? The barbecue sauce is just too intensely flavored. I love barbecue sauce, but Burgers' sauce hits me as artificially smoky. I just couldn't shake the taste of too much liquid smoke in each bite. 

In all reviews, personal preference plays a key factor, but I do my best to remain objective where possible. I simply can't do it here. If you love the Burgers' Smokehouse sauce, you're going to love these ribs, but they're simply not for me.

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When you're cooking five different ribs at the same time, things can get a little confusing. I put the Burgers' Smokehouse and the Smithfield ribs in the oven at the same time on different racks and immediately forgot which was which. Thankfully, despite similar sizes — Smithfield comes in a 38-ounce package — the appearances are pretty starkly different, thanks to the much lighter Smithfield barbecue sauce.

At 48 cents per ounce, Smithfield is a bargain compared to the first two on the list, and the taste is also a step up. A cook time of 45 to 50 minutes at 375 degrees Fahrenheit until the meat reaches 200 degrees — or close to it, since these are precooked — results in a rib that is a perfect midpoint for this list. It's tender, but hardly falls off the bone. The sauce is a bit more acidic and less sweet than the earlier entries, but still plenty delicious. 

On the whole, this rib is one I'd be satisfied serving, though there are better options out there. That said, Smithfield does get a shoutout for having the easiest-to-open packaging on the list. While I had to slice into a vacuum-sealed bag for the others, trying to avoid the ribs while also coating myself in sauce, this was an easy open, peel-apart package that makes something easy — precooked ribs — even easier.

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The Kroger ribs ended up in second place for one reason: they're not precooked. As the lone raw outlier, the prep time is significantly longer, though not necessarily more difficult than the rest. While I had to remove all other ribs from their packaging and wrap them in tinfoil, the Kroger ribs come in an oven-safe plastic bag. A half-inch incision along the top for venting and a spot on a pan was all I needed before tossing these into a 400 degrees Fahrenheit oven for 80 minutes, or until an internal temperature of 190 degrees was reached.

Once the baking process was done, I let the ribs sit for 10 minutes before cutting open the ballooned cooking bag. If you've ever seen a rakish archaeologist saw through the wrappings of an Egyptian mummy with a pocket knife, it's a bit like that, but the treasure inside is far more appetizing.

I purchased the St. Louis-style pork ribs in Chipotle Pepper flavor, and the smell was fantastic. These ribs are seasoned, but not sauced, which was just fine with me. I didn't need any sauce because there was so much flavor in each meaty, tender bite. The ribs aren't fall-off-the-bone, but they're really good and for 31 cents an ounce, a steal. Yes, they take a bit longer to cook, but you never have to touch raw meat and my pan didn't even get dirty. That's hard to beat if you want fresh ribs at home.

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I had a long, hard debate about numbers one and two on this list, but in the end, Curly's lands the top spot for a combination of convenience and quality. At 57 cents per ounce for a 24-ounce package, Curly's provides mid-range value, albeit in one of the smaller racks. Size aside, it's definitely the best of the precooked options, and thanks to a cooking time that's half that of Kroger's ribs, Curly's is the way to go for quick, at-home ribs.

Sauced like most of the others, Curly's lands somewhere between the sweetness of Kingsford and the more acidic sauce of Smithfield. The meat on these ribs is the closest in quality and tenderness to Burgers', but the sauce is far superior. In revisiting leftovers — of which I have plenty — I kept coming back to Kroger and Curly's. If you're at the store and craving ribs, but don't want to put in a ton of time and effort, a rack of Curly's is exactly what you need.

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Pre-cooked, pre-sauced ribs may not sound like the peak of barbecue eating, but I was pleasantly surprised by how many solid options there are in the meat section of the local grocery store. While some could stand for an improvement — Kingsford sauce on Burgers' ribs would be great — there are several strong candidates for an easy, at-home barbecue. All of the ribs do have instructions for heating on the grill and even the microwave, but I went with the oven because it was 35 degrees Fahrenheit and raining in Wisconsin when I was cooking. That is not barbecue weather.

I purchased all my ribs and then froze them for a few days before cooking them. I fully thawed them in the refrigerator before cooking each according to the package instructions. My evaluations were based on taste, appearance, smell, and texture.