Business: Campbell’s Mr. Soup

WILLIAM B. MURPHY

FEW U.S. executives take work home with them more regularly—and attack it with greater relish—than William Beverly Murphy, 53, president, chief executive and final taste maker of Campbell Soup Co., the world’s largest producer of canned and frozen soups. Every night Murphy has soup for dinner. It may be a new soup from Campbell’s experimental kitchens, a staple variety whose quality Murphy wants to check on, or he may relax with his favorite—tomato soup mixed half-and-half with milk. Whatever it is, he knows what he likes and what the U.S. consumer likes. Last week Campbell’s reported sales for its 1959-60 fiscal year were up 4% over last year (to $516,190,278), per-share earnings up 16% to $3.71, the best ratio of profits to sales in the industry.

Both figures are records for the 91-year-old company, and something of a milestone in an economy where a cost-price squeeze has cut many a business profit this year despite larger sales. Furthermore, President Murphy last week announced that prices of 17 of Campbell’s 102 products are being reduced —and none increased.

Much of this is Bev Murphy’s doing. In the seven years since he became Campbell boss, one-third of the company’s 102 current products have been added to the Campbell line. He was one of the first to sense the housewife’s increasing demand for the so-called “convenience” foods. In 1954 Campbell introduced the first frozen soups. After Omaha’s C. A. Swanson & Sons brought out the first successful frozen TV Dinner, Murphy recognized a good thing. Campbell bought Swanson’s in 1955, has doubled the Swanson line, reduced the cost of a TV Dinner by one-third.

THIS was all in the Campbell tradition. In 1897 a young Campbell chemist, Dr. John Thompson Dorrance, invented one of the first convenience foods, condensed tomato soup. He piled up a fortune of $115 million from soup before he died in 1930. Today Campbell sells everything from frozen blueberry pie to spaghetti sauce.

Like Dorrance, Murphy has a background in chemistry. Born in Appleton, Wis., Murphy went to the University of Wisconsin (B.S. in chemical engineering, 1928), joined Campbell in 1938. After a wartime stint on the War Production Board, he came back to Campbell as executive assistant to President James McGowan Jr. When McGowan retired in 1953, Murphy took over and began moving fast to give the venerable company a newer look.

One of his first decisions as president was to assign 20 engineers to work on automating the canning industry, traditionally resistant to technological advance because of the necessity of hand-sorting of foodstuffs. Campbell’s engineers devised an electronic sorter for rice grain, another for vegetables. To preserve the reputation for quality of Campbell products year in and year out, Murphy’s tasting boards check soups and other foods coming off the production line in Campbell’s nine major U.S. plants every hour of the day. At 11 a.m. the manager and his executive assistants at each plant pause for spot taste-testing. If the celery in Sacramento’s soup, or the carrots in Omaha’s TV Dinner, are the wrong color or taste, the whole production batch is thrown out. Campbell once destroyed $5,000,000 worth of tomato juice because it failed to measure up to Campbell standards.

ONE of Campbell’s biggest changes under Murphy is in the handling of employees. When he took over, things were little changed from Dorrance’s day: even vice presidents had to report personally to the president when they were going to be away from the Camden. N.J. offices during business hours, even for a trip to the dentist. Executives were discouraged from participating in community affairs. Murphy, who earns a salary of $180,000 a year, has given his executives their own hours, shown the way in outside activities, e.g., he heads up the Crusade for Freedom campaign to raise money for Radio Free Europe. A blue-eyed six-footer who once ran the high hurdles for Wisconsin, Murphy plays what he calls “a bad game of golf,” a sport he returned to after years of playing “a bad game of tennis.”

Under Murphy, Campbell has built four new U.S. and Canadian plants, is currently investing heavily in overseas operations, plans to build new plants in Australia and Latin America. Next year Campbell will spend $24 million for capital improvements and more than $6,000,000 on research into new products and plant economies. The reason, explains Murphy: “By 1970, we believe the growth rate of convenience foods will more than double the growth rate for foods in general.”