Campbell’s Family Tradition

History shows that America’s first Thanksgiving was held in 1621. We actually know what they served at that first dinner, and let me tell you, the menu looks like it was made for a logging gang trying to drop thirty pounds on the Atkins diet: lobster, goose, turkey, rabbit, cod, venison, chicken and duck. They only had two side dishes, in fact, “a pudding of Indian corn meal with dried whortleberries” and “a savory pudding of hominy.” Their diet alone goes a long way towards explaining why there are no more Pilgrims. It’s a pity they didn’t exist long enough to know Dorcas Reilly, and therein lies the tale.

In 1869 a New Jersey fruit merchant named Joseph Campbell formed a partnership with a local icebox maker named Abraham Anderson. Anderson was the early key to the business because he knew how to make cans by hand, but Campbell must have been the brains for the new firm was launched as the “Joseph A. Campbell Preserve Company.” The duo’s original line of products consisted of canned tomatoes, vegetables, jellies, soups, condiments and mincemeat.

In 1897 the company’s general manager, Arthur Dorrance, reluctantly hired his nephew, Dr. John T. Dorrance, a chemist who had trained in Europe, to head up the firm’s lab. The good doctor must have thought his uncle was a real Scrooge, for his starting salary was a miserly $7.50 a week. To add insult to injustice, John was so eager to get the job that he actually agreed to pay for his own lab equipment. You could say that the new guy paid out pretty fast; he invented condensed soup before his first year in the business was up! Wouldn’t you have liked to sit in on his first performance review: “Well, Johnny, you’ve created a multi-million dollar new revenue stream for the company, so we’re giving you an out-of-cycle 20% bump. How are you going to spend that extra $1.50 a week?” By taking the water out of the soup, or condensing it, Campbell was able to reduce costs virtually across the board in packaging, shipping, and storage. The net effect of Dr. John’s invention was a 10-oz. can of condensed soup (to which you added the water) that sold for a dime, versus a 32-oz. can of regular soup that sold for 30 cents. It would be a gross understatement to note that consumers “got” the value equation!

Dr. Dorrance became the president of the company in 1914, and would go on to revolutionize food marketing from that position. One of Campbell’s first advertising programs was to place ads in New York City streetcars. Amazingly, the ads doubled sales in the already huge metropolitan area. By 1915 Dr. John was able to buy out his uncle’s share of the business and take over sole ownership of the firm.

In 1916 the company came out with the first recipe guide for its products, “Helps for the Hostess.” This modest cookbook would prove to be the forerunner of countless individual recipe tearpads as well as recipe books that have changed the way America eats. But all the soups and recipes that have evolved over the years, none has captured the attention of consumers the way that Dorcas Reilly’s invention has. Reilly was the midwife, as it were, who gave birth 48 years ago to the mother of all comfort foods: “Campbell Soup’s Green Bean Casserole.”

The now 77-year-old Reilly was in charge of the Campbell Soup Co. test kitchen in 1955 when the recipe was created. “My initial inspiration for the Green Bean Casserole was really quite simple,” Reilly notes. “I wanted to create a quick and easy recipe around two things most Americans always had on hand in the 1950s: green beans and Campbell’s Cream of Mushroom soup.” Like all great recipes, the casserole requires a minimal number of ingredients (just five), doesn’t take much time, and can be customized to fit a wide range of variations.

Campbell estimates that 40% of its annual sales of Cream of Mushroom Soup end up in this recipe, which isn’t too surprising when you consider the company also estimates that 1.5 million cans of Campbell’s soup are used as an ingredient to prepare dinner every day. “The green bean casserole has been the focal point of our holiday efforts for the last five years,” according to Russ Neale, Associate Marketing Manager of Red & White Cooking Soups at Campbell. Although consumers use the recipe year-round in their cooking, Thanksgiving represents the pinnacle of usage with an estimated 20% to 30% of all US households making the casserole for their holiday feast. Run the numbers on that one and you’ll discover we’re talking 17.6 million homes on the low end. Figure that one casserole feeds six, and you’re reaching an estimated 105.6 million Americans in one meal, well over a third of the total population, and that’s on the low side as an estimate.

With usage numbers like that, the annual marketing push around Thanksgiving is staged like the invasion of Normandy. “Around here,” notes Neale,” we talk about ‘winning’ the holidays.” Campbell uses a marketing blitzkrieg to make the big putsch work, employing radio, television, p.r., FSIs as well as extensive in-store material to launch their holiday cooking season each November. For the last three years, for example, they’ve had a shared fullpage FSI with French’s Fried Onions, as well as a displayable pallet program that delivers both products and complete P-O-P directly to stores. “Recipe P-O-P is crucial to what we’re doing,” Neale notes. “You’ve got to get meal solutions in mom’s hands if you’re going to be successful.”

It’s surprising given their strategic relationship with French’s that Campbell has eschewed developing a similar relationship with a green bean supplier. “We prefer not to dictate whether consumers use canned, frozen or fresh green beans in the casserole,” notes Campbell’s corporate spokesperson, John Faulkner. “In my house. We always have canned green beans on hand. From a culinary standpoint we’ve been as flexible as possible.”

It’s hard to believe that a single recipe, promoted aggressively, can become a national tradition, but Campbell’s has certainly done it. Consider this: their Cream of Mushroom soup ranks as one of the six fastest moving items in the entire dry grocery category. Campbell is currently endeavoring to extend soup usage through a program called “Tasty Tuesday,” which offers different meal solutions, many using soup as a sauce base, for each Tuesday of the year.

Last year Reilly appeared at the National Inventor’s Hall of Fame to donate her original copy of the recipe to the museum. Her now-yellowed 8 X 11 recipe card takes its place alongside Enrico Fermi’s invention of the first controlled nuclear reactor and Thomas Alva Edison’s two greatest hits: the lightbulb and the phonograph. Mrs. Reilly minimized her contribution by noting, “It was probably [developed] just in the flow of the normal recipe work we did.” Give the lady her due: like all great inventors, she simply added 1+1+1 and got it to equal a 10.

Have a favorite campaign from years past? Contact Rod Taylor, senior VP of CoActive Marketing, at [email protected].

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