The Campbell's Soup Company, that icon of childhood comfort food, has posted a six percent increase in its third quarter sales.
The main reason behind this profit explosion?
Wellness.
Now you may ask, just what does wellness have to do with people buying more soup?
The folks at Campbells are jumping on the wellness train. They have successfully reformulated many of their soups, transforming them from high sodium foods into lower sodium offerings. In many cases, they are also offering lower fat versions of many of their classics. That, along with rearranging the soup aisle to make their soups easier to locate, is what's behind the increase in sales.
Now I just happen to have a can of Campbell's Tomato in my pantry. There is a label on the back that states the soup has two times more lycopene than a fresh tomato. Ok, that sounds like a good thing. Let's see what else is in this can.
Ingredients: tomato puree, high fructose corn syrup, wheat flour, salt and spice extract.
There go the alarm bells...the second ingredient is highly glycemic high fructose corn syrup. So even though Campbell's Tomato gets high marks for no fat, high in lycopene and no artificial flavors or colors, the high fructose corn syrup (which gives the soup its sweetness and adds to the total carbohydrate content) makes me question the company's true comittment to wellness.
Maybe I'll experiment with an alternative recipe, one that's still just as convenient (or almost) and report on my results in a later post.
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