The Campbell's Soup Inflation Index
or how a humble soup can reveals our modern privilege
[This is an updated version of last year’s original piece]
In 1900, Campbell’s condensed soup was three years old. It sold for 12 cents a can. Campbell’s even printed the price in their ads (a tactic for a less competitive era). Many brands did this, even though print ads appeared in magazines and newspapers that would lie around your house for months. So, what if someone picked up a six-month-old issue of The Saturday Evening Post, got misled about the price, and then started an angry confrontation at the local A&P?
Hang on. Take a deep breath. Inflation was meager in this period despite the economic growth caused by high industrialization.
How low? Unbelievably low.
“The dollar had an average inflation rate of 0.40% per year between 1897 and 1900, producing a cumulative price increase of 1.20%.”1
What?! 0.40%! How do we get that time machine I keep seeing movies about?
There was zero risk of Campbell’s printed ad price being out-of-date.
Campbell’s condensed soup was invented by John Dorrance, a company employee soon rewarded with a company Director position (those days are over, kids). His descendants control the company’s Board of Directors to this day. Well played, John.
To make condensed soup, you cook the soup, extract much of the water, and squeeze two servings into one tin can. This condensing process reduces the cost of freight, inventory storage, and packaging. Condensing boosts profits while technically lowering the cost per serving to the end consumer, who happily provides the water. The end consumer also receives a not-so-subtle message—feed more people, buy more soup.
OK, this is all fascinating historical trivia, James, but what do 12 cents mean to us as denizens of 2024? I don’t even use coins anymore. Twelve cents is not even a currency value I’ve seen outside my savings account interest in the 2010s.
OK. Let me help you find an equivalent to a 12-cent can of Campbell’s condensed soup in our modern era. But don’t say I didn’t warn you. You spoiled residents of the 21st century may be disgusted with your vapid privilege when you’re done reading this piece.
Understanding the 2024 Equivalent Value of a 12-cent Can of Soup in 1900
The best way to comprehend the actual value of a 12-cent can of Campbell’s condensed soup in the year 1900 is to equivalize the can financially and culturally in today’s bizarre context.
This involves four variables:
Dollar inflation (i.e., declining purchasing power ) of the U.S. Dollar from 1900-2024 (!) - 3100%2
Number of soup ounces in a 1900 can condensed soup vs. one today (at Walmart) - same (!)
The price of one can nationwide in 1900 vs. today at Walmart - $0.12 vs. $1.26
Our cultural definition of a soup serving in 1900 vs. today - 10 ounces of soup fluid vs. about 18 ounces of soup fluid.3 When we eat soup, we want more of it today. We want more of everything. Look around. So, a 10.75-ounce can of condensed soup (which yielded 21.50 ounces of hot soup for two people) is presumed to have a 55% smaller serving size than today’s food culture demands.
OK, now cue some super-secret, fancy math: A $0.12, 10.75 oz. condensed soup can in 1900 = 0.55 cultural soup servings today = ($0.12*31*1.81)
= $6.73 equivalent value in $2024!
In today’s context, $6.73 is like buying a Grande, triple-shot latte at Starbucks or a grab-n-go salad from the Safeway Deli. In other words, the 1900 condensed soup can comps well culturally to how we approach restaurant and food service pricing today.
“Just make the food for us please,” we say all the time now, when, in 1900, this was a pretty new cultural desire.
Understanding Early Canned Soup As a Premium Status Item
Campbell’s soup wasn’t just for the rich in 1900. It was one of the early consumer brands to push into seasonal grocery buying patterns and trigger trade-ups based on modern notions of domestic convenience and an appeal to industrial awe.
Those crazy factories. What will they make for us next?
Condensed soup back then, like a Starbucks latte today, was a trade-up purchase for the middle and working classes - an affordable luxury. You did it for special occasions, not every week. You didn’t store cases of soup in your pantry. Not at 12 cents a can. No way. The average household in 1900 spent around $164 a month on food. And this was 43% of their monthly spending. Twelve cents was not aristocratic, but, like our overpriced lattes, it was not a trifle for ordinary folk.
Today, the modern cultural equivalent volume of Campbell’s condensed soup sells for only $1.26. Soup was much more precious by volume in 1900, especially given how much effort it took to make fresh soup (and how much of your monthly spending went to food back then).4 Canned soup today is the epitome of a low-value commodity for us, in large part, because the price of Campbell’s condensed soup has come down about 83% (when equivalizing for the declining value of a dollar and declining cultural value of soup). When something becomes too cheap, we devalue it even if we use it regularly. This phenomenal price relaxation required modern supply chains, a severe decline in ingredient quality to reduce costs, and a switch from tin cans to steel alloy containers (tin was not cheap packaging in 1900).
The wow factor behind canned soup was the marvel of industrial food processing that could perfectly simulate the work of a home cook at an enormous scale AND preserve the food for months. Remember, in 1900, most American women knew how to make fresh soup on the stove. But it takes hours to cook fresh soup, which requires lots of wood or coal as fuel. Centralizing cooking in a canned item eliminated much of this soup-making fuel cost, the annoyance of monitoring the cooking, and the bother of it all! And there was no refrigeration. Your time-consuming, fuel-sucking fresh soup had to be eaten that day. People with low incomes were not in the condensed soup game at all. I also wonder if the urban poor back then would have ever bothered to make fresh soup due to the fuel cost of heating a burner for hours. I have doubts.
Early users seemed to consider canned soup with a long shelf life a luxurious modern marvel. It broke ALL the rules of female-dominated home food production and augured a world where cooking, one day, would be optional. Really? What next, an ice box that runs on electricity? Or a machine that sweeps my floors for me? Or a store where I could just drive up and pay for a hot meal tray through a window?
I suspect that the ‘ancient’ tradition of using Campbell’s recipes for Holiday meals originates from the brand's original entry into American homes as an affordable luxury item—when kitchen convenience was seen as a luxury, not a civil right.
By 1904, Campbell's reportedly sold 16,000,000 cans of soup annually. For a U.S. population of 82,000,000, this yielded one can sold for every five Americans. Again, this is the typical population reach of affordable luxuries but not everyday necessities like toilet paper, milk, sugar, or laundry detergent.
Today, however, condensed soup sold about 1.1 billion units (in 2016) to a population of 330,000,000, or ~3 cans per American annually!5 That’s a 15X increase in annual per capita soup consumption…when you make it super easy and cheap.
PS - The End of Soup?
Soup's cultural relevance and price have also declined. It’s hot now, and more Americans want cold food and drinks on more occasions per year. I recently read somewhere that 74% of SBUX drink sales are now cold drinks! What?
What is going on? Are the cold weather curmudgeons of New England doomed to extinction to be buried with their scratched-up soup bowls?
A lot more Americans live in warm-weather states than in 1900, states where it is only cold in the mornings most of the year (i.e., not savory soup time). The effective soup season distributed across national geography leads to an increasing misalignment that no marketing campaign can overcome. Have a look for yourself.
Here is the U.S. population density at the county level in 1900 vs. 2010. I’ve overlaid the % of the population living in the southern, warm states (CA, AZ, NM, TX, LA, AL, MS and FL)
Soup doesn’t sell well in Arizona or Florida. And we frankly don’t seem to care at all down here. I hear no pining for soup in Tucson.
Or maybe soup has become so bad and cheap that we just forget about it, like a cheap IKEA end table.
Or maybe we’re too busy doing a Starbucks latte run.
Soup has lost its cool, for sure.
https://www.officialdata.org/
This coefficient comes from the CPI online inflation calculator, which only goes back to 1913. Economic historians suggest that inflation between 1900 and 1913 was close to zero to use 1913 as my starting point. So, it is possible that the value of a 12-cent soup can was slightly less than this analysis indicates.
I arrived at this number by evaluating the size of your average ready-to-eat soup serving by using the average container size from Progresso, Campbell’s, and other brands - 18 ounces. If you heat up any container from these brands it will also be roughly the equivalent to a “bowl of soup” at a restaurant. In other words, there has been at least a 50% increase in our definition of the appropriate cultural serving size (driven by the restaurant bowl standard).
A rare government source reveals that the average American household spent around XX% on food each month. Today we spend only around 11% on average according to the BLS.
Statista, my analysis