Sun Sentinel Palm Beach Edition
Hoping to bowl over consumers
Campbell uses fresh thinking for new soup brands
In the research and development kitchen at Campbell Soup, chef Todd Lyons spent much of the past 18 months fine-tuning a batch of new recipes.
Would shoppers go for chicken noodle soup with kale added as a healthful twist? (Answer: a resounding yes.) Would a cauliflower soup seasoned with dill land in their shopping carts? (Answer: probably not.)
Lyons was creating the culinary prototypes for two of three new lines that the packaged-food empire has rolled out on supermarket shelves in recent months. But it is also fair to say that he — along with an army of Campbell’s marketers, product developers and supply-chain experts — was trying to cook up a recipe for the company’s future.
Campbell’s soups are cold-weather staples that debuted more than a century ago, products that were pioneers of mass food manufacturing and helped make shelf-stable goods a fixture in the American pantry. But today’s growing preference for the opposite approach to eating — seasonal, fresh, organic — is hammering the famous brand.
Consumers ages 39 and younger have increased their consumption of fresh food by 23 percent from a decade ago, according to the market researcher NPD Group. And the center aisles of the grocery store — the long rows of canned goods, cereals, packaged cookies and the like — account for a shrinking share of supermarket sales.
Meanwhile, research from the market data firm Mintel suggests that shoppers are gravitating to small, boutique brands for food and other products. That’s a challenging pattern for a behemoth company that pulled down $7.96 billion in revenue last year, including from mass brands such as Pepperidge Farm and Goldfish, and whose products can be found in retail spaces as diverse as groceries, pharmacies and gas station convenience stores.
It is against this backdrop that Campbell’s U.S. soup business has entered a yearslong rough patch, highlighted by sales that declined or remained flat for the past eight quarters. So the company has developed three new lines of soup — Well Yes, Garden Fresh Gourmet and Souplicity — to try to put its soup business back on a steady footing. Each line targets a slightly different shopper, looks starkly different from the red-andwhite cans rendered in Andy Warhol paintings, and is cast as an answer to shoppers’ desire to eat simple, healthful ingredients.
The marketing push is an effort to make store-bought soup a mainstay of millennials’ shopping lists. And its success or failure will offer lessons that could reverberate through the wider packaged-food industry.
If shoppers are often steering clear of the center aisles, Campbell reasons it needs to meet them in the parts of the store that they visit. That is why two of the new soups, Garden Fresh Gourmet and Souplicity, are refrigerated products that come in plastic containers, not cans, that can be sold on the cold shelves that line a supermarket’s perimeter.
Souplicity is the highestend line of the three, a single-serving organic product that comes in such flavors as “Carrot Curry Ginger” and “Broccoli Parmesan Lemon.” This is designed for a health-conscious customer — picture, perhaps, a yoga devotee who already springs for items such as cold-pressed juices. Campbell made sure to market-test this one in Southern California, a hub of healthful eating.
Campbell made this line using a method called highpressure processing, which is meant to help the product retain its color and flavor without preservatives. The company previously used this technique for organic juices and other Garden Fresh Gourmet items.
Garden Fresh Gourmet soups, on the other hand, come in 24-ounce containers and are aimed more at feeding a family. Campbell spent $231 million in 2015 to acquire Garden Fresh Gourmet, a health-focused brand that had built a loyal following for its small-batch salsa and hummus. The soups add to that offering and aim for similar brand positioning — no artificial flavors and sweeteners, but not organic.
Refrigerated soups also call for a different supplychain execution than that used for canned soups: The shelf life of Souplicity, for example, is about 50 days, compared with two years for many canned soups. That means the new soups need speedier delivery to stores and must be transported in refrigerated trucks. And then there’s the task of building a consumer base.
“Everything I’ve learned as a brand manager coming up through the ranks, I’ve had to unlearn,” said Suzanne Ginestro, chief marketing officer and general manager of innovation at C-Fresh, the division of Campbell Soup that makes fresh food.
In her experience, a big food company takes a promising line nationwide right away, storming grocery store shelves and blitzing TV screens with commercials. That’s not what Ginestro is doing this time, though.
There are no major media campaigns now for Souplicity and Garden Fresh Gourmet. And the products so far are sold in just a small set of grocery stores, where Campbell can see how shoppers react to them and then slowly build into more stores.
The third new line, Well Yes, isn’t quite as much of a reach. It comes in a can; you’ll still find it in center aisles. It’s not organic, although artificial flavors and ingredients are shunned in manufacturing it.
Those choices help keep the price of Well Yes relatively low, crucial for reaching its target customer. This shopper, which Campbell dubbed “Maria” during its development process, is a young Generation X-er or a millennial. Maria already buys canned soups.
“Consumers don’t want to consume products where they feel like they’re on a diet,” said Erin Lash, an analyst at the investment research firm Morningstar who studies the packagedfood industry.
Indeed, targeting a dietminded shopper has tripped Campbell up in the past: Several years ago, it went big with low-sodium soups, trying to cater to the nutrition concerns of the moment. Turns out, customers didn’t find the soups very tasty without the salt. While Campbell still offers some low-sodium varieties, it pulled back significantly on this strategy.