Campbell Soup is one of the companies on the Power Group list. Here's an interesting 2 year old article from PACKAGING WORLD.
Uncanny developments at Campbell Soup:
Campbell Soup Co. (Camden, NJ) has an undeserved reputation as a one-product/one-package company. It almost never has been a single product company, and it has always used a variety of packaging forms.
In 1936, the company started producing its own cans. Campbell remains one of the giants in the food can production business-and one of the last food processors to make its own cans. How much longer that continues remains to be seen.
There are rumblings that Campbell, if not abandoning the metal can as a packaging option, is thinking about exiting the canmaking business. By this time next year, Campbell soups will most assuredly be packaged in cans made by someone else.
But, even if the company stops making cans, it certainly is not going to abandon the fabled "Red and White" labels.
Next year, as it celebrates the 100th anniversary of the development of condensed soups and the 61st year of self-manufacturing of cans, Campbell may, at last, shake off its single-dimension, soup-in-a-can image.
Recent packaging introductions coming out of Camden suggest the company is aggressively looking for packages that appeal to a new generation of consumers with neither the time, the patience, the know-how, nor the need to prepare "scratch" meals.
In March, Campbell arguably became the first packer in the U.S. to pack a tomato-based juice in hot-filled bottles of polyethylene terephthalate. There's still a lot of canned V8 on the market, but it may only be a matter of time before the bottle's advantages of product visibility, handling ease, resealability and cleanliness replace the can.
No one is watching the introduction by Stockpot Soups (Redmond, WA) of condensed soups in refrigerated STAND-UP POUCHES (see PW, May '96, p.88) closer than Campbell. If Stockpot's flexible pouches help themselves to anything more than a small taste of the condensed soup market, Campbell will retaliate with one or two lightweight refrigerated soup packages of its own.
Today opening/reclosing ease is one of Campbell's primary packaging pushes. The V8 bottles, the soup jars, and Campbell's newest, Swanson's chicken broth in snap-cap resealable 32-ounce aseptic cartons from Tetra Pak, Inc. (Chicago, IL) all are designed for toolless opening and simple reclosure.
***** Can the TCBG packaging be microwaved (condensed soups) since it contains a foil layer? If so chicken broth, tomato and others would be fine for on the go lunches. Don't need a spoon.
Steve
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