He took the water out, and a hot lunch became ordinary.
This is the seventeenth profile in The Brand That…, a series about American brands that taught the country a habit, became the word for the thing itself, and outlived the world that made them. We tell their stories plainly and with respect — what they made, what it cost, and what they still are.
The Founding
Two men who understood produce went into business in Camden in 1869.
Joseph Campbell was a fruit merchant. Abraham Anderson had been canning in Camden since about 1860. Later company retellings would make him an icebox manufacturer, and the detail is everywhere now, but no record from his lifetime says what he did before he canned.
The ground was well chosen. South Jersey grew tomatoes in quantity, and the Delaware carried cans to Philadelphia and New York on the morning tide. Canned food in 1869 was not something Americans distrusted; it was something most of them could not afford. If the timing was wrong, it was early rather than late.
Anderson left in the 1870s and set up again under his own name. Camden’s larger story, the shipyard and the record presses and the dog in the tower, is told in the companion series, in The City That Recorded America’s Voice.
The Rise
In 1897 Arthur Dorrance hired his nephew at seven dollars and fifty cents a week and let him buy his own laboratory equipment.
John Thompson Dorrance had a degree from MIT, a doctorate from Göttingen, and a soup habit picked up in Europe. He was twenty-four. Soup in a can already existed, and it was heavy, mostly water, and priced past the family that would have wanted it most.
Dorrance took the water out. A can of ten and a half ounces did the work of a thirty-two-ounce can, because the cook put the water back at the stove. That cut the tin, the freight and the shelf space, and put the price at ten cents against roughly thirty.
The invention was not the soup.
The invention was the dime.
A label in red and white arrived in 1898. The company has long said an executive chose the colors after watching Cornell play at Franklin Field; no record from the time confirms it. At the Paris Exposition of 1900 Campbell took a bronze medal, behind Franco-American and Huckins, who took silver in the same class. The medal went onto the label printed in gold, and the gold was the printer’s choice.
What the dime bought was a hot lunch in ten minutes.
That was the habit, and it went deeper than any slogan. In 1955 a home economist in the test kitchen named Dorcas Reilly put cream of mushroom soup together with green beans and fried onions, and her index card later went to the National Inventors Hall of Fame, because she had written a national holiday obligation on it without knowing.
When Warhol painted the cans in 1962 he set the canvases on shelves like a grocery aisle. It was already art before he got to it.
The Turn
Holding the dime is the whole story, and it is also the trap. In 1915 the company’s executives believed that raising the price to eleven cents would ruin them, so they held the price and took the cost out somewhere else. For decades there was only one somewhere else, and it was the floor of the Camden plant.
The tomatoes went first. Campbell had been canning California fruit since 1947, bought plants at Dixon and Stockton in 1976, and had its breeders at Davis before the decade turned. In the autumn of 1979 the company told South Jersey growers it was finished with their tomatoes; the Philadelphia Evening Bulletin reported it that October under the headline Out of the Soup. The pulp line at Camden’s Plant No. 2 stopped the following year.
It is tempting to call that the severing, and I keep turning it over, because the numbers will not let it stand. New Jersey harvested 17,200 acres of processing tomatoes in 1960 and 14,500 in 1970. By 1979 it was 7,000, and California held four-fifths of the national crop. The decision cost the state another quarter of what was left, and it was also the loudest event in a collapse already twenty years along. The announcement did not kill the Jersey tomato. It read the verdict aloud.
The plant went next. In August 1989 the company announced four American closings; Camden employed 940, and the company called it only the second layoff in its 120-year history. The last can came off the line at midnight on March 1, 1990. It was pork and beans. A thousand people came back the next morning for final checks, at a plant a hundred and twenty-one years old, in the city where condensed soup was invented.
On a Sunday morning in November 1991 a contractor imploded the remaining buildings to clear the riverfront. Four steel tanks painted as soup cans came down with them, and one landed almost intact on the rubble. A man from the Camden Preservation Trust said that when a twenty-two-ton can of soup falls out of the sky undamaged, it is a message from God that you have to save it. Campbell’s paid the demolition contractor ten thousand dollars for it, and a trucking company hauled it to the port terminal to wait for new legs, a repainted label, and re-erection as a memorial to the people who had worked there. The money never came, and the fullest history of the company says the can rusted into oblivion.
The Reckoning
The tomato harvest ran eight weeks, and the plant took on half again as many workers to meet it, then let them go. The company recruited that labor from Puerto Rico, Mexico and the Caribbean, paid women and boys less than men for the same work, and put Black workers in the lowest and hardest jobs. In 1927 it set a quota for every hand on the line and paid a bonus for beating the clock.
They organized against it for fifty years. The labor board certified Local 80 in 1941 after an election the union won 1,918 to 886. The local seceded from its own international in 1950 rather than be merged where it did not want to go, spent a year on its own, and voted in 1951 to join the packinghouse workers. It was still there in 1990 when the plant closed under it.
The fields were harder, because farmworkers had been written out of the labor law and had no board to go to. Baldemar Velásquez had started organizing with his father in 1967. Workers in the Ohio tomato rows and the Michigan cucumber fields struck in 1978, boycotted Campbell’s from 1979, walked from Toledo to Camden in the summer of 1983, and went after the banks that served the company. It took a commission under a former Secretary of Labor and five months of talks, and in Detroit on February 19, 1986 the union, the growers and Campbell’s signed the first three-way contract of its kind, and the first farm labor contract outside California. It raised the tomato harvesters’ base pay to $4.50 an hour, against a federal minimum of $3.35 that many had not been making at the ends of the season.
It covered six hundred people.
And the growers were not villains in it. The president of the Ohio tomato growers said that without the contract he would have lost a quarter of his acreage — it might not have killed us, but it sure would have opened a wound. A cucumber farmer from Bowling Green said plainly that it would raise his costs and he could not afford to pay more for farm labor than he already did. A man at Heinz explained why the cucumber fields were the battleground at all: the tomatoes were picked by machine now, and cucumbers were still picked by hand. The work the union had organized was already being taken by something that did not negotiate.
What Endures
Campbell’s is still in Camden, in a headquarters it opened in 1957. It is The Campbell’s Company now, renamed by its shareholders in 2024. This September it reported annual sales of $9.7 billion, down five percent, cut its dividend by thirty-six percent — the first reduction since 2001 — and wrote down two of its snack brands.
The interesting part is where the ground held. Snacks took the write-downs. Condensed soup gained share in a shrinking category, and cooking-related products went from thirty-seven percent of American retail sales three years ago to fifty-two percent now. The company that spent a decade buying its way out of the soup aisle has been walked back in by its customers.
In 2017 it bought two hundred thousand pounds of beefsteak tomatoes from a farm in Hammonton and cooked them to Dorrance’s handwritten recipe.
Somewhere at noon today a pan is on a burner and a can is open beside it, and the water is going back in where the chemist took it out. It is the arithmetic he worked in a laboratory he had to equip himself — weight out, price down, a hot bowl in the middle of an ordinary day, for people who were counting. The plant is gone, the tomatoes come from California, and the great steel can that fell out of the sky rusted in a port yard waiting for a memorial nobody built. What is left is smaller and it is the thing itself: the pan, the spoon, the ten minutes, and the noon.
Campbell’s warmed the American noon, and that is worth remembering.
Why Campbell’s? It did not invent canned soup; it invented the price of canned soup, and the dime made a hot lunch ordinary in American houses that had never had one. The deeper advantage was never the recipe — it was a can engineered to carry less water and more trust than anything else on the shelf.
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Charles Cranston Jett is an author, civic educator, and Professional Certified Coach based in Chicago. A graduate of the U.S. Naval Academy (Class of 1964) and Harvard Business School, he served aboard nuclear submarines during the Cold War. He is the author of six books, including Super Nuke!, hosts four podcasts, and writes across his Critical Skills Blog platform on history, leadership, and the health of the American republic. In his writing he uses AI tools for research, editing, and occasional image creation; the arguments, the voice, and the final judgment are his. He and his wife, Dr. Nancy Church, live at Water Tower Residences, where they co-host the Chicago Salons.