Campbell Soup | featured news

Campbell Soup Co. is closing two US plants and cutting more than 700 jobs as it looks to trim costs amid declining canned soup consumption. The world's largest soup maker said Thursday that it will close a plant in Sacramento, Calif., that has about 700 full-time workers.

Campbell's profit fell 5.4% as soup sales dropped 3% in the U.S. Continued weakness in soup was offset with better results in the quarter from the V8 juice brand and Pepperidge Farm's Goldfish Crackers and in Canada.

A Nielsen advertising effectiveness study commissioned by Apple and Campbell's Soups to evaluate the soup brand's iAd campaign said viewers were twice as likely to recall seeing it, three times as likely to remember the ad message and five times as likely to remember the brand as viewers who saw it on TV.

Campbell Soup Co. is recalling 15 million pounds of SpaghettiOs with meatballs after a cooker malfunctioned at one of the company's plants in Texas and left the meat undercooked.

Campbell Soup's earnings rose 17% as margins improved and without expenses that weighed on year-earlier results. But soup revenue fell in the absence of product introductions that boosted last year's sales.

Campbell Soup's quarterly profit and sales declined, hurt by lower volume and the stronger dollar.