The Campbell Soup Company is foraying into new territory this month with the launch of a new line of frozen soups.
Campbell’s Fresh Frozen Soup marks the first time the Canadian arm of the Camden, n.j. company is mixing two of its three product areas frozen foods and condensed soups to bring the red-and-white label into the grocery freezer for the first time.
The product, which is being tested in Ontario before rolling out nationally, comes in four flavors: Beef and Garden Vegetable, Creamy Broccoli and Cheese, Tuscan Style Minestrone and Country Chicken Noodle.
‘This is the least cannibalistic product that we’ve ever launched,’ says Gino Cantalini, marketing director of the Toronto-based company’s frozen grocery division. ‘It’s a whole new category.’
Campbell’s frozen soups have been available in restaurants for years, according to Cantalini. Leveraging the company’s brand equity to enter a new section of the store simply made sense, he says.
And Campbell Soup couldn’t have picked a better section on which to focus its energy. According to ACNielsen’s 1996 frozen food study, frozen dinners and entrees (in between which Fresh Frozen Soup will be placed) grew a cool 16% to $518.8 million dollars, accounting for almost one-quarter of sales in the frozen foods category, in the year ended Dec. 7, 1996.
And, while household soup penetration is high (96%, according to Cantalini), the household penetration of frozen food at 63% has plenty of room to grow. Cantalini says the company with its battle cry of ‘One More Bowl’ sees frozen soup as the way of the future.
Meanwhile, Campbell’s u.s. parent has been testing its own version of the product, called Restaurant Soup, in a few markets since November, according to Cantalini. He says Restaurant Soup, which is packaged in larger premium-style green and black pouches, has recently been extended into more test markets after receiving positive feedback.
The Canadian arm decided to take a different tack and focus on the product’s freshness to attract the time-starved yet quality-hungry grocery shopper the company has always courted. Like frozen vegetables, frozen soup tastes fresher than canned, says Cantalini. ‘You don’t have anything mushy in there.’
The packaging on this side of the border, by Toronto-based Plewes-Bertouche Design Group, uses the white-on-red Campbell’s script that appears on all of its soup brands, along with a close-up product shot. Fresh produce appears in the background, while across the top of the square box (which contains a tray of two portions) is an old-fashioned market vignette.
‘It screams fresh,’ says Cantalini.
Young and Rubicam of Toronto, in its first work for Campbell, developed three 30-sec. spots, to air in mid-October through March.
The spots feature two female friends the type who finish each other’s sentences in a kitchen chatting about the soup. The tag line is: ‘Now this is great soup.’
The company has also arranged extensive in-store sampling programs and coupons, along with a ‘freezer program’ carried over from the company’s Swanson frozen dinners promotion wherein freezers full of the product are offered as giveaways at grocery stores across the province.
If all g’es as expected, the company will roll out the product nationally next fall, just in time for soup season. ‘This is such a huge investment,’ says Cantalini, ‘We’re either going to do it right or not at all.’
Campbell’s competition will be keeping a close eye on the company’s launch.
‘We always watch competitors,’ says Ralph Bolhuis, vice-president of brand development for Unilever Canada’s Thomas J. Lipton, makers of Lipton brand, Cup-a-Soup and the more premium Soup Works.
Bolhuis says that he cannot divulge whether the company has a frozen soup in development.
