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Campbell’s hopes to make canned soup a hot commodity again

An AP Member Exchange shared by The Philadelphia Inquirer

PHILADELPHIA (AP) — Soup Is Good Food.

Canned soup, even beyond the famous tagline, has been good enough to keep Campbell Soup Co. in the Fortune 500 club every year since the list started in 1955.

The Camden company, which turned 150 this year, still sells more than one billion cans of soup a year, and is profitable enough to pay the granddaughter of the inventor of condensed soup more than $200,000 a day in dividends.

But the stalwart, one of the few Philadelphia-area companies with national brand-name recognition, is in the middle of a fight to figure out its place in a world where consumers are less and less thrilled about canned soup than they were decades ago.

Over the last five years, revenues at the nation’s largest food and beverage companies have either fallen or marginally rose with the help of multibillion-dollar acquisitions. Besides Campbell, that group includes household names like PepsiCo, Coca-Cola, Kraft Heinz, General Mills, and Kellogg.

The world has changed around processed-food companies like Campbell, founded in the 19th century and turned into cultural and commercial Goliaths in the 20th century. Starting decades ago in some cases, these venerable brands have stumbled through years of attempts to grow as consumer perceptions of quality shifted dramatically and a fragmented media landscape made it harder to reach them.

“When these companies first started and when they grew, the definition of quality for the consumer was different than the definition of quality for the consumer now,” said Ernest Baskin, a professor of food marketing at St. Joseph’s University. “Process was actually a good thing and consumers thought that things that were mass produced were A, consistent, and B, they were very safe.”

Now, Baskin said, “consumers no longer think that processed food is the epitome of quality. Particularly, Millennial preferences are shifting toward other types of products.” These are products consumers perceive as less processed, he said.

Still, Campbell’s new chief executive, Mark Clouse, is confident that new life can be breathed into what he calls “fabric-of-the-nation” brands like Campbell’s Soup.

“It’s not usually the brand that’s the problem as much as it is the orientation of our company,” Clouse, who took over 10 months ago, said in an interview this month at the company’s headquarters, where 1,200 work.

Clouse entered the scene after his predecessor, Denise Morrison, made a huge push to diversify Campbell into less processed foods.

The company spent more than $2 billion on the carrot and beverage seller Bolthouse Farms and other businesses that have since been sold at a steep discount. That debacle landed Campbell in a takeover fight with activist investor Dan Loeb, who eventually won two board seats and helped pick Clouse to succeed Morrison, who departed abruptly in May 2018.

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