Good Stuff to Read Today: How Douglas Conant Cleaned up Campbell Soup

Bruce Horovitz has written an informative and entertaining article about how Douglas Conant resurrected the ailing Campbell Soup company in today's USA Today.  You can read the article here.  There are likely few people in the country who haven't heard of Campbell Soup.  We didn't have any money to buy Campbell Soup when I grew up in the Great Depression but I survived in part while batching it through college on many cans of cream of mushroom, chicken noodle, and a few other varieties.  I envied my richer fellow students who dined luxuriously at the college cafeteria and the frat houses.  Lately, after becoming more sodium conscious, I shunned Campbell Soup until they began reducing sodium significantly, but probably still not enough.  Besides, I had unhappy memories of avoiding starvation in college on opening those little red cans of soup and downing them with peanut butter and jelly.

Horovitz writes that each home in America probably has a half dozen cans of Campbell's in their pantries.  Quick-fix recipes for decades were whipped into shape by cans of cream of mushroom, cream of chicken, and others.  The author notes that not much happened at Campbell's since its founding in 1869 until the last decade.  Conant's self-described mission was to take a "bad" company "and lift its performance to 'extraordinary' by the end of one decade--that's by 2011."  By replacing brands,  introducing microwaveable soups, reducing salt in many brands, eliminating MSG, and generally providing a healthier focus on Campbell's products, Conant appears well on his way to success.  Campbell's has outperformed the market during the current downturn.

Conant's career at Campbell's provides an outstanding object lesson in how you remake a moribund company with stale brands and outdated ingredients into a resurrected company that not only survives, but also provides consumers with enticing new and healthier products.  The graveyard of major corporations that stay in ruts for decades too long and continue to tell themselves that what they did for decades is good enough for now takes up a big chunk of the Stupid and Brain-dead Companies' Cemetery.  You'll like the Campbell Soup story.  Anyone like Conant whose summer reading includes the complete works of Zane Gray and whose daughter includes the statement "sometimes you annoy me" on her list of 50 "favorite things" about her dad, definitely should be a success.