Campbell Soup Co. is expanding globally, but also developing locally.
CEO Denise Morrison, speaking in Philadelphia at the International Economic Development Council’s annual conference, outlined Campbell’s efforts to develop the Gateway Office Park surrounding its corporate headquarters in Camden, N.J.
Campbell Soup (NYSE: CPB), which was founded in Camden in 1869, has 1,200 employees in the city (and 20,000 overall). In the fiscal year ended July 28, it had sales of $8.05 billion and net income of $689 million.
Campbell’s is on 50 acres and the surrounding office park makes a total of 100 acres. The food giant has taken on the role of master developer of the site, though it is working closely with state-and-local officials.
Companies wanting to build in Gateway would be eligible for state incentives, including tax credits for up to 10 years and reimbursement of up to 40 percent of project costs, among other benefits. The incentives are part of New Jersey’s efforts to compete more squarely with Pennsylvania’s Keystone Opportunity Zone incentives.
“This is a longer-view project,” Morrison told me after her talk. “Philosophically, we’re making a profit but we’re also making a difference.”
Campbell’s vice president of taxes and real estate, Rich Landers, is part of a team trying to get PATCO to build a stop at the office park — an effort that could take five to 10 years, he said. At present, employees taking the PATCO line can stop at the government center in Camden, about a mile from the Campbell’s campus. Campbell’s runs shuttle buses to its site.
Its relationship to Camden, Landers said, could be likened to that of Urban Outfitters (NASDAQ: URBN) in the Philadelphia Navy Yard.
Campbell’s has already made major changes at its headquarters, not the least of which are cultural.
In her talk, Morrison said when she became CEO in 2011, “cubicles gave way to open work spaces” and, outside, chainlink fences gave way to an open campus environment.
As a company, the Campbell Soup of 2011 was “slow to respond” to market changes and had a “burning need for change.”
Strategically, Morrison consulted with the likes of IBM’s architect of change, former CEO Samuel J. Palmisano, who gave her simple advice: “Denise, you can’t miss the ‘shift,’” he told her, according to her account.
By that he meant changes in the marketplace and consumer tastes.
“I was intrigued by how they made the transition from hardware to PCs to services to big data,” she said.
She visited with IDEO, the Palo Alto, Calif.-based design consultantcy, where she observed how “small teams morph from project to project.”
Back at Campbell’s, Morrison instituted a culture based on three ideas: to adapt, evolve, innovate.
That translated to small, “nimble” teams made up of both new and veteran employees that might include a chef, a consumer expert, a marketing person and an R&D specialist, she said. The teams working directly with consumers, going to the supermarket with them, cooking with them, talking about buying habits.
“That changed the way we did innovation and helped with speed to market,” Morrison said.
Campbell’s also looked at demographic changes, including sweeping changes in the Hispanic marketplace, growing markets in China and Latin America and changes in how consumers buy products.
A digital team studied how consumers use the web to shop but also to connect to brands, giving consumers access from “the little screen to the big screen,” Morrison said.
To lessen the dependence on the same line of goods, Campbell’s invested in product development — for instance, building a Pepperidge Farm innovation center in Norwalk, Conn.
It also opened the wallet to acquire existing companies that already had command of niche markets. In the past 15 months, it has acquired Bolthouse Farms, a maker of juices, salad dressings and packaged fresh foods; Plum Organics, which produces organic baby food in squeezable pouches; and Kelsen Group, a Denmark-based maker of sweet biscuits.
In February, Green Mountain Coffee’s Keurig machines will start dispensing Campbell’s K-Cup Soup, giving it another avenue into the office market.
Source: Philadelphia Business Journal
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