I Tried 12 Pancake Mixes, and One Brand Was So Much Better Than All the Others

Pancakes signify that a breakfast is special, and that's true whether the pancakes are made from scratch or come from a box. In fact, the convenience of a boxed pancake mix cannot be denied—especially when there are ways to make the flapjacks taste more homemade. There is less measuring and fewer dirty dishes, and mixes are portable and perfect for campsites, vacation rentals, and even college dorms.

To sort the best from the rest, we tested 12 different types of pancake mix (11 boxes and 1 shaker), all available in major grocery stores or online, to determine which boxed pancake mix was the very best. We considered each mix's convenience, flavor, and texture.

Keeping these features in mind, we found the Pearl Milling Company Original Pancake & Waffle Mix to be the best.

Read on to discover the best pancake mixes, according to our testing.

Best Pancake Mix at a Glance:

Best Overall: Pearl Milling Company Original Pancake & Waffle Mix
Best Fluffy Texture: Great Value Extra Fluffy Original Pancake & Waffle Mix
Best Organic Pancake Mix: Birch Benders Organic Classic Pancake & Waffle Mix
Best Gluten-Free Pancake Mix: King Arthur Flour Gluten Free Pancake Mix

What We Looked For When Ranking Pancake Mix

Convenience: One of the advantages of the best pancake mixes is the "just add water" component, especially if you're in a situation without access to fresh milk and eggs, such as a camping trip or power outage. Plus, let's be real — if you're going to melt butter and break out the eggs and milk, you may as well just make your baking mix from scratch.

Flavor: Pancake mix is an astoundingly versatile product, and the sheer number of options available is overwhelming. To simplify this taste test, we focused on "original" pancake mixes and shied away from "enhanced" types of pancakes, such as protein pancakes.

However, we did try as many gluten-free pancake mixes as we could find, both because of celiac disease's prevalence and the wider amount of gluten-free pancake mix available.

Texture: The perfect pancake strikes a balance between fluffy and slightly buoyant. It doesn't leave a dryness in your mouth or impede the chewing process with a gritty or powdery feel.

How We Tested Each Pancake Mix

Pancake mixes may make for a simple breakfast, but this was one of our more cumbersome taste tests. This is partially because we conducted it in tandem with a pancake syrup taste test (stay tuned for results). Mostly, however, the difficulty was credited to the sheer number of pancake mixes available.

I didn't try more than three types of pancake mixes in one tasting session, and took caution so nobody would be eating cold pancakes or pancakes that had been sitting around for a while in order to eliminate environmental impacts on their taste and texture.