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2022 Shipper of Choice profile: Campbell Soup Co.

Making soup more sustainable one supply chain partner at a time

At the Campbell Soup headquarters in Camden, New Jersey. (AP Photo/Mel Evans)

The Shipper of Choice award, presented by FreightWaves in partnership with TriumphPay, recognizes the manufacturers, distributors and retailers that do the best job of keeping the American economy moving by fighting driver detention, providing accessible facilities and understanding what it takes to remove inefficiencies from the supply chain.

Among the top 25 Shippers of Choice for 2022 is … Campbell Soup Co.

About Campbell Soup Co.

New York Stock Exchange TickerCPB
HeadquartersCamden, New Jersey
2022 net sales$8.56 billion
Adjusted 2022 net earnings before interest, taxes$1.3 billion
Shipper of Choice history3rd appearance

Why Campbell is a Shipper of Choice

Campbell Soup Co. is famous for its soup cans with the red and white labels. But the company produces much more than soup. Other brands include Pacific Foods, Swanson and V8 and snack brands such as Late July, Cape Cod and Pepperidge Farm Goldfish.

Keeping a goal of providing nutritious products in mind, Campbell has undertaken significant efforts to ensure a sustainable supply chain. Not only has Campbell been looking at its own operations to see how it can deploy sustainable practices, it has been examining the sustainable practices of its partners.

Recent sustainability efforts have included the completion of the first supply chain water risk assessment aimed at determining how much water resources go into growing feedstock and manufacturing products.

The objective was to expand “the scope of our water inventory and risk assessment beyond our own operations to also look at water impacts throughout our entire supply chain,” Campbell said in its 2022 corporate responsibility report. The company set a goal in 2017 to reduce water use by 20% on an absolute basis by fiscal year 2025. 

Other sustainability efforts include ensuring suppliers are accountable to Campbell’s responsible sourcing supplier code, which outlines how suppliers can operate ethically and sustainably. 

Meanwhile, to improve supply chain efficiency, Campbell has employed an enterprise resource planning tool to track the materials received, manufactured and shipped to customers, according to the corporate responsibility report. This tool has helped Campbell integrate Snyder-Lance’s portfolio, which Campbell acquired in 2018, into Campbell’s system managing vendor, ingredient and packaging data. 

Campbell’s wider supply chain resiliency goals include “building a supply chain that is resilient to the impacts of climate change, including extreme weather, floods, and droughts; and ensuring a secure supply of ingredients by diversifying sourcing regions, ensuring backup supply options, and enabling sustainable agricultural management,” the company said in its corporate responsibility report.

Campbell earlier this year hired a new chief supply chain officer to succeed the outgoing one. Daniel L. Poland, a consumer packaged goods veteran and former Kind chief operating officer, joined Campbell in January, succeeding retiring Campbell executive Bob Furbee.

Campbell is working on smoothing out the short-term challenges that impacted the company’s supply chain in fiscal year 2022, according to an earnings call. Some of those short-term challenges have included grappling with labor availability and distribution issues for certain brands. Material availability, such as a tight supply for aluminum cans, affected certain brands, and matching product output with demand also contributed to supply chain challenges in 2022. 

Campbell dealt with these challenges by being more flexible with packaging and formulation so that the company wouldn’t be solely dependent on single sourcing.

“I feel tremendous about the progress we’re making on supply chain, [although] we still have a few businesses where material availability has slowed full supply recovery,” said Campbell President and CEO Mark A. Clouse during the fiscal fourth-quarter 2022 earnings call on Sept. 1. 

About Shipper of Choice partner TriumphPay

TriumphPay is the transportation industry’s premier payment network trusted by leading shippers, brokers, factors and carriers. Its innovative and highly automated fintech payment solution brings cost savings and efficiencies to antiquated transportation payment processes for network participants. Integrated financing options leverage the strength of TriumphPay’s parent bank and can provide liquidity and cash flow visibility.

TriumphPay is a division of TBK Bank, SSB, Member FDIC, and a member of the Triumph Bancorp Inc. (NASDAQ: TBK) group.

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Joanna Marsh

Joanna is a Washington, DC-based writer covering the freight railroad industry. She has worked for Argus Media as a contributing reporter for Argus Rail Business and as a market reporter for Argus Coal Daily.