The food revolution is here to stay. Seismic demographic and economic changes and the fusion of health, well-being, and technology have reshaped the way food innovators grow, make, market, and sell food. Consumers are seeking fresher, healthier, and naturally functional foods. Make no mistake, the most exciting time for disruptive innovation is the here and now.
Campbell Soup Co. is navigating this sea of change. Our anchor is our company purpose, “Real food that matters for life’s moments.” This purpose, which we declared in 2014, has been a galvanizing driver of culture change at Campbell. It is the North Star that guides our innovation and serves as a filter for our decisions.
But what exactly is “real food”? This was a discussion that Campbell’s R&D and quality leaders contributed to over the course of 18 months. We believe that real food comes from the earth. It is made with recognizable, desirable ingredients from plants or animals. Real food should be prepared with care and be responsibly crafted using ethical sourcing and sustainable practices that safeguard the natural resources we all share. Real food should be accessible to all. It should always be safe and available at a fair price. And finally, real food is food we’re proud to serve in our own home. It’s the food we feel good about serving to our families.
There is an essential ingredient I have not mentioned. And, in fact, it is the most important attribute of everything we do in food and beverage R&D, and that is taste. Campbell’s passion is to make delicious food that consumers love. The innovation challenge is that real food that tastes good is not an either/or proposition. Our food must be both. This is the essence of innovation. Constraints drive innovation. Our company and our consumers have huge expectations around delicious flavors. The reality is that like many food companies, we have constraints—constraints around costs, ingredients, and manufacturing. Solving for those constraints and delivering delicious real foods and beverages that consumers want while creating layers of competitive advantage is the holy grail for our industry. It is how R&D organizations can add the most value to their company.
Giving Consumers What They Want
But let’s start at the beginning. Job one of food companies is to cultivate a deep understanding of the consumer. What do consumers care the most about in their food? R&D organizations must adopt a consumer-first mindset, or they will quickly be out of business. Codevelopment is one approach for bringing a consumer-first mindset to life. Working directly with consumers helps R&D teams prioritize costs and efforts on the design features that are most likely to move the needle. For example, Campbell recently launched Well Yes!, a ready-to-serve clean label soup line that features ingredients such as kale, quinoa, and lean protein. A group of Campbell women staff members representing a number of different teams throughout the company, including marketing, R&D, and consumer affairs, drove the concept from the beginning because they felt the category lacked a product specifically for them, with ingredients they wanted. We invited a group of consumers who felt the same way to work with us, and together they cocreated the brand with Campbell’s chefs, product developers, and marketers. Well Yes! soups are made from few, simple ingredients and include no artificial ingredients, preservatives, or modified food starch. So how do we add value other than great formulations? As one example, the soups are sweetened with a new natural sweetener that is sourced from multiple geographic areas.
I have a lot of passion for the notion that the best way to make delicious foods and beverages is to use high-quality, real food ingredients. The charm and the challenge of being in the food industry is that any time you work with Mother Nature, there’s going to be some variability. You have to build your processes to accommodate that. Another example of tapping into the benefits that Mother Nature affords is our use of caramelized onions. Instead of using a caramelized onion flavor, we use caramelized onions themselves. It was not easy to qualify a supplier who could do this for us, but the results are well worth the effort. We get a superior flavor … using real food ingredients.
This work is not easy. It requires a great deal of ingenuity and resolves, two things that were vital in the introduction of Pepperidge Farm Goldfish Baked with Whole Grain and Pepperidge Farm Goldfish Made with Organic Wheat in 2015 and 2016, respectively. (Pepperidge Farm is a Campbell brand.) Whole grain and organic wheat represent challenges in quality that are not found in white flour. The lot-to-lot variation requires a robust recipe design to accommodate differences in quality. The art of the baker is required to adjust how we bake to accommodate the differences.
Here is another example. In 2016, we launched Prego Farmers’ Market, a new sauce line that is made with tomatoes picked at their peak, herbs, and vegetables—the kind of ingredients you would find at your local farmers’ market. We start with our Campbell’s vine-ripened tomatoes and olive oil (no soy, sunflower, or canola oil) and finish with garlic, basil, and oregano. There are no added flavors (natural or artificial) or any other artificial ingredients. Our culinary team was involved from the start, creating the gold standard and helping to translate that standard for consumer testing. Consumers told us that texture was supremely important for delivering the cues of freshness they were looking for. We tied this consumer insight into new technical insights and developed a unique process for our tomatoes that provides the texture and experience that sets Farmers’ Market sauces apart from our standard Prego recipes. During the development process, from kitchen batches to the pilot plant and beyond, we worked with our chefs and manufacturing partners to refine the recipes to ensure we could consistently deliver the right texture on a larger scale.
Prego Farmers’ Market and Whole Grain and Organic Wheat Goldfish are examples of new products within existing brands. What about reformulating recipes for existing products? Reworking recipes to remove the things consumers don’t want and adding more of what they do want creates a whole new set of challenges. One seemingly simple ingredient substitution may negatively impact the flavor or the cost. When we make ingredient substitutions, we look holistically at the entire recipe, including how it is cooked and prepared in the plant. In 2015, we announced a new recipe for Campbell’s condensed chicken noodle soup for kids, a move that we believe will continue to close the gap between the kitchen and our plants. We removed ingredients that moms and dads would not find recognizable or desirable, including MSG, disodium guanylate, and disodium inosinate. To offset the loss of disodium guanylate and disodium inosinate, which are flavor enhancers, we changed the proportion of yeast extract and other flavorings.
What about flavors? We believe that the best flavors are found in nature, and we use them to add a depth of taste to our food. The million dollar question (perhaps quite literally) is, how do you maintain the flavor from a plant, a spice, or a crop all the way to the finished product? Campbell’s R&D teams spend a lot of time thinking about the ways we extract flavors and minimizing the steps that go from the source of the flavor to the consumer’s table. We’ve partnered with several flavor and spice providers that select the best breeds of herbs and gently dry them or press them for their essential oils. We’re also looking at ways to use less heat on some of our products while still being safe and shelf stable so that the natural, real flavors come through. We find inspiration from what consumers in different parts of the world already enjoy. For example, in Japan, the umami flavor for fermentation enhances the eating experience in a unique way. If we can leverage that understanding in our recipes, we can enhance our consumers’ eating experience using real food.
Monosodium glutamate, or MSG, is one of several food compounds that elicit an umami taste. Replacing MSG while maintaining its savory flavor is very challenging. Campbell has partnered with a flavor house that specializes in natural ingredients and flavors that deliver the unique umami taste, and many of our products are now using this technology.
Campbell has promised to use fewer ingredients that people don’t want, and we’re holding ourselves accountable. Our Real Food Index is scoring our progress. The index shows the percentages of our branded portfolio products that are without certain undesirable ingredients. For example, in our Americas Soups, Simple Meals, and Beverages division, more than 98% of products are free of artificial preservatives. Our Campbell Fresh division, which includes Bolthouse Farms beverages, salad dressings, and carrots and Garden Fresh Gourmet salsa, hummus, dips, and fresh soup, is in a similar place. High-pressure pasteurization (HPP), a cold pasteurization technique, is one technique we use in Campbell Fresh to elevate freshness. In fact, Bolthouse Farms was one of the first food producers to use HPP on a broad scale. Products are sealed in their packaging, put into a chamber, and are then subjected to ultra-high pressures transmitted by water, a process that kills microorganisms, eliminating the need for heat or added preservatives.
Campbell’s Real Food Index also tracks our progress on artificial colors, which we have committed to being nearly free from by the end of fiscal 2018. For our V8 Splash line of beverages, we are working with our ingredient partners to replace artificial colors with natural ingredients. The natural colors that are in our test kitchens today come from beets, purple sweet potatoes, spinach, and orange, purple, and yellow carrots. The technical challenge is that natural colors tend to be less vibrant and they don’t hold up as well over longer shelf life. For V8 Splash consumers, color is important; it’s how they find and purchase their favorite products. And yet there is no dilemma. There is no either/or option, with real food in one corner and attractive color in the other. Our objective is to have both attributes. We’re working closely with multiple supplier partners and experimenting with different natural colorants.
Back to the Future
Reflecting on Campbell’s real food journey, in some ways, it feels like back to the future. Campbell began in New Jersey in 1869, in part because of the beefsteak tomatoes—the best ingredients we can use—overflowing from local farms. Eight years later, Campbell chemist John Dorrance invented the formula for condensed soup. Bringing real vegetables to people in the off-season is what propelled Campbell’s growth and helped create the company we are today. Most of our iconic brands started as real food designs, and as demand increased, the company’s focus shifted to bringing better-tasting, safer food to more people. The technical solutions for returning to our real food roots start where our brands started. We are applying greater scientific rigor and understanding to our early recipes, with the goal of reproducing them in the context of today’s consumer and today’s supply chain and distribution systems. R&D organizations have a real opportunity to lead the food industry into the future. The real food revolution has given us a burning platform to do so. The question is, where will the real food revolution take us next?
Carlos J. Barroso, a professional member of IFT, is senior vice-president, global research and development and quality, Campbell Soup Co., Camden, N.J.