Campbell’s Soup diversifies through acquisitions

Early acquisitions by Campbell’s Soup of Camden, N.J., have had dramatically different outcomes.

First, in 1915, the company purchased Franco-American Food Company, which was established in 1886 in Jersey City, N.J., by Alphonse Biardot. He had immigrated to the United States from France in 1880. At the time, Franco-American’s primary products were French soups and assorted gravies.

 

Franco-American had a loyal following of consumers who enjoyed canned products like Spaghetti and Meat Balls, SpaghettiOs, RavioliOs and Macaroni and Cheese, but in 2004, Campbell’s decided “to retire” the Franco-American brand. 

It folded SpaghettiOs and the gravies under the Campbell’s umbrella. Macaroni and Cheese was unceremoniously dropped from the lineup.

 

The primary celebrity spokesperson for the Franco-American brand in the late 1950s was actress June Lockhart, who promoted Macaroni and Cheese in television commercials.

 

Jimmie Rodgers, the pop singer known for “Honeycomb,” originally sang the famous “Uh-Oh! SpaghettiOs” jingle when the canned pasta rings were introduced in 1965. 

He adapted the tune from his recording of “Oh-Oh, I’m Falling in Love Again” (1958). The jingle went: “The neat round spaghetti you can eat with a spoon...Uh-oh, SpaghettiOs!”

Singer/songwriter Barry Manilow wrote a number of top-flight advertising jingles, including “Who Can? Franco Ameri-Can” in 1974 for Franco-American Spaghetti with Meatballs. It concludes: “Spaghetti that’s long on fun, to the last one – Franco-Ameri-Can!”

 

Campbell Soup’s second acquisition saw the company purchase the V8 Vegetable Juice brand in 1948. 

The deal included V8’s manufacturing facility in Napoleon, Ohio (about 45 miles southwest of Toledo).

 

The beverage was first concocted during the Great Depression (1933) by entrepreneur William Gilbert Peacock in the basement of his home in Evanston, Ill. Peacock was hoping to invent an affordable and healthy drink that would provide people with essential nutrients from an assortment of hand-blended vegetable juices.

The story is reported by Dr. Neil Gale, editor of The Digital Research Library of Illinois. 

He said Peacock brought in Frank Constable of Chicago to help him arrive at the proper formula. Tomato juice originally accounted for about 87% of the content, but seven other vegetables were also included in the mix.

They were beets, carrots, celery, lettuce, parsley, spinach and watercress, along with spices, such as dill. The precise formula remains a carefully guarded secret.

 

The name V8 was selected by Peacock and Constable to align the product with the power of a V8 automotive engine…to get your motor running.

 

Since 1948, Campbell’s has invested heavily in the V8 product line. Some of the entertainment industry heavyweights who pitched V8 products were: Ann Sheridan, Shirley Temple, Fred MacMurray, Dorothy Lamour, Rhonda Fleming and Ronald Reagan.

 

Today, Campbell’s Napolean, Ohio, manufacturing facility, with more than 2 million square feet of floor space, produces way more than just V8 – it accounts for more than one-third of all Campbell’s soups and other products in the company’s “meals group” and two-thirds of all its “beverages.”

A giant replica of a red and white Campbell’s Tomato Soup can is situated outside the plant. It stands 33 feet tall and contains 200,000 gallons of water for the warehouse sprinkler system.

 

Local officials say it would take 2,178,645 regular-sized cans (10.75 ounces) of Campbell’s Tomato Soup to fill the tank.

The site also contains a massive 23,040-panel solar field, a city-sized wastewater treatment plant and a biodigestor that converts fruit and vegetable waste into methane gas to fuel the plant’s generators.

 

Campbell’s employs about 1,300 people at its Napoleon plant, making the company, by far, the largest employer in the region. (Napoleon’s population is 8.635.)

The community was settled along the Maumee River in 1832 and is named after French Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte.

Campbell’s Soup celebrates life of Dorcas Bates Reilly

July 22, 2026, is a red-letter day in the history of Campbell’s Soup, as the company observes the 100-year anniversary of the birth of Dorcas Lillian Bates Reilly.

 

She was the homemaking wizard who invented the classic “green bean casserole” recipe in 1955, using Campbell’s Cream of Mushroom condensed soup.

 

Around the Campbell’s Test Kitchen in Camden, N.J., Dorcas Reilly was known as the “Grandmother of the Green Bean Bake.”

 

The recipe uses only six ingredients: canned or fresh green beans, Campbell’s Cream of Mushroom soup, soy sauce, black pepper, milk and French-fried onions. 

The company says that today, green bean casseroles appear on more than half of all Thanksgiving tables in America.

The original recipe has earned a place of honor in the National Inventor’s Hall of Fame in Akron, Ohio.

Cream of Mushroom is one of “Campbell’s Big Three” that account for the bulk of sales. Cream of Mushroom remains as the top choice as a “cooking soup.” 

Tomato is the all-time best seller with Chicken Noodle close behind. These two varieties are known widely as America’s “comfort food cure-alls.”

Dorcas Lillian Bates was born in Woodbury, N.J., on July 22, 1926. She earned a bachelor’s degree in home economics in 1947 from Drexel Institute of Technology (Drexel University) in Philadelphia, Pa., and became one of the first full-time employees in Campbell’s Test Kitchen in 1949.

As a recipe developer, she created hundreds of different recipes, including Campbell’s tomato soup meatloaf, a tuna-noodle casserole, types of porcupine meatballs (ground beef and rice) and the Sloppy Joe “souperburger.”

 

Dorcas Bates married her high school sweetheart Thomas H. Reilly in 1959. She took a leave of absence from Campbell’s to raise her family but returned in 1981 as manager of the test kitchen. She retired from the company in 1988. Dorcas Reilly died in 2018 at age 92.

 

Campbell’s Soup cans have been identified by the classic red and white packaging wrappers since 1898. 

The dynamic color scheme “struck” Campbell’s executive Herberton L. Williams while he was attending an Ivy League college football game at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia.

The visiting team, Cornell University of Ithaca, N.Y., donned snappy uniforms – red jerseys and white britches. 

Williams felt red and white labels would make Campbell’s soup products “easily identifiable.” 

A central medallion featured a double-headed eagle.

In 1900, Campbell’s Soup was awarded a bronze medal for product excellence at the Paris Exposition in France. That was a big deal, because more than 50 nations participated. The eight-month event attracted more than 76,000 exhibitors to showcase their achievements, inventions and cultures. Essentially a world’s fair, the expo drew 51 million visitors.

The 2.5-inch diameter medal was designed by Jules-Clément Chaplain, a sculptor and official medalist of the French government.

The obverse (or front) side of the medal featured a profile of Marianne, the national symbol of the French Republic, wearing a Phrygian cap and oak branches, with the Paris skyline visible in the background.  

 

The reverse (or back) side contained the winged Victory, holding a laurel wreath and palm branch in her right hand. A triumphant male athlete, seated on Victory’s back, holds a torch in his left hand. Below Victory is a depiction of the Grand Palais, which housed the fine art exhibition at the expo.

 

Because the 1900 Summer Olympic Games were held concurrently with the expo, the International Olympic Committee authorized Chaplain’s medals to serve as the prizes for the Olympians as well

Campbell’s management decided to use the reverse view of this prestigious international award “to validate the quality of its condensed soups to the American public.”

Meet Colorado’s own ‘Father Goose’ figure

Fort Collins, Colo., had its own “Father Goose” – Gurney Ivan Crawford (1903-84). He spent his entire career as a Colorado state wildlife conservation officer and successfully introduced Canada geese to this region of the Rocky Mountains.

 

Crawford once told a news reporter that he literally took the first brood of goslings under his wing in 1957, saying: “It’s what I live for – these birds.”

 

It’s quite a love story. Erin Udell, a reporter at the Fort Collins Coloradoan said that Jack Grieb, chief of the waterfowl division, came by the Crawford home one day with a clutch of goose eggs that he had collected in Denver, about 60 miles south of Fort Collins. He simply said: “Hatch ‘em, Gurney.”

 

“Crawford did just that, using his own Bantam hens as impromptu foster moms, as well as hot water bottles and incubators to warm and hatch the eggs,” Udell said. “When the eggs hatched, the hens got a big surprise in the fuzzy little goslings that emerged.”

At nine weeks old, the first group of Canada goslings were released at College Lake, about three miles from Colorado State University’s main campus in Fort Collins.

“Crawford continued to raise goslings in his home and built nesting structures that kept predators away from unhatched eggs,” Udell wrote.

“Known for their intelligence and strong family ties – geese mate for life and flocks stick together – the birds on College Lake got to know Crawford so well they could single out his truck as he drove up to see them,” Udell added.

“The project was a hit as the geese settled into the northern Front Range of the Rockies, which has the perfect combination of scattered ponds and reservoirs, agricultural crops like corn and grains, and fresh grass to feed on,” she said.

Dr. Jim Gammonley, who leads the avian research team for Colorado Parks and Wildlife, told Udell that Colorado’s resident geese population has stabilized between 20,000 to 30,000, with several thousand of those making their home in Fort Collins and the surrounding area.”

The project was highly successful in boosting recreational opportunities like hunting and bird watching.

The new resident flock also attracted migratory Canada geese, using the Central Flyway between the Arctic and the American Southwest, to stop in Northern Colorado during the winter, when they would typically fly straight to New Mexico, Udell wrote.

Dr. Gammonley estimates that nowadays, 200,000 migratory Canada geese can be found statewide in Colorado during the winter season.

Sixty years ago, the human population of Fort Collins was about 25,000. The community has since mushroomed to about 172,000 people in 2026.

“With human population growth,” Dr. Gammonley said, “we began seeing more human-goose conflicts.”

Phil Bourjaily, a columnist with Field & Stream magazine, said the “hefty honkers” present some challenges. He notes that a goose can poop a pound a day.

Several years ago, Denver launched a goose-culling operation. It rounded up urban-dwelling geese and carried them off to a nearby meat processing plant. Protest rallies ensued, expressing horror. Signage claimed: “Goose Lives Matter.”

Bourjaily said that Vicki Vargas-Madrid, Denver’s current wildlife program manager, is a proponent of using “non-lethal methods to contain the flock.” 

One tool is the “Goosinator,” a remote-controlled fan boat painted like a bright orange shark. The contraption operates on lakes and ponds in a zigzag pattern to mimic a predator, triggering thousands of birds to take flight.

“The hope is the strategy will encourage the geese to migrate out of Denver,” Bourjaily said.

Meanwhile, Denver’s Canada geese protection society and city officials are hopeful that conversations for attaining a “sustainable, multi-species environment” will be productive.