A soup advertising war heats up

Suddenly, soup is the story du jour: an inexpensive food that's a favored antidote for changing fall weather or slumping stock prices.

Tired of watching your portfolio disintegrate like a saltine gripped by a toddler? Shares of Campbell Soup Co. and its top competitor, General Mills Inc., began October at 52-week highs and have fallen less than most of the market in this month's downturn. Making comfort food, it seems, is a recession-resistant business.

But there's another reason soup's hot: an advertising battle pitting Campbell against General Mills' Progresso brand over the ingredients on each company's labels.

Campbell struck the first blow last month, with ads in The Inquirer, the New York Times, and a slew of papers around the country.

"Bring your dictionary," one ad declared, over the ingredient list for a can of Progresso's "Italian-Style Wedding" soup, which was shown alongside the ingredient list, about half as long, for Campbell's new Select Harvest version of the same soup. The headline over Campbell's version said, "Bring your appetite."

The ad highlighted such Progresso ingredients as sodium stearoyl lactylate and hydrolyzed corn protein.

"No artificial flavors. No MSG," Campbell's ad said of its Select Harvest soups. "Real ingredients. Real taste."

It's too early to tell whether the so-called "comparative ad" campaign has boosted Campbell's sales. But it quickly brought the soup wars to a boil.

Progresso fired back last week, buying its own full-page comparative ads in The Inquirer, Times, and other papers where Campbell's ads had been published. The ads announced Progresso's plan to remove MSG - monosodium glutamate - from its entire line of about 80 soups.

"Campbell's has 95 soups made with MSG," the headline said. "Progresso has 26 delicious soups with no MSG. (And more to come.)"

Today, each company defended its recipes and its marketing approach - as well as its own use of MSG, which each called perfectly safe - while differing on what the whole ad war is about.

Campbell spokesman Anthony Sanzio said the Camden food company introduced its new Select Harvest brand after studying the preferences of women ages 35 and above.

"They wanted soups that would have readily recognizable ingredients - the kind of things they would have in their pantries and their refrigerators," Sanzio said in an interview.

Sanzio said Campbell turned to comparative ads because it thought its all-natural recipes spoke well for themselves. "We're saying, 'Here's what's in our soup. Read what's on the label in their soup.' "

Tom Forsythe, a spokesman for General Mills, which is based in Minnesota, said Campbell was responding to Progresso's success.

"We have been focused on taste and weight management and [on] bringing innovation to the market," Forsythe said. "More than three million households have moved to Progresso soup in the last two years alone. So we do think we have Campbell's attention."

Campbell, which still claims nearly two-thirds of the ready-to-serve soup market, says Progresso's focus on MSG misses the broader point of Campbell's new product line: recipes that rely only on recognizable ingredients.

"What Progresso has decided to do is create a distraction because they don't like the way their product compares to our product. So they started to compare apples to oranges," Sanzio said.

At least one scientist who has studied MSG suggests taking this entire fight with a soupçon of skepticism.

"I'm sure it's a useful advertising gimmick, and it's at the same level of validity as the ads in the presidential campaign," said Bruce P. Halpern, a Cornell University professor of psychology and neurobiology.

Halpern said repeated studies had shown that ill effects from MSG, commonly used in some varieties of Asian cooking and derided as the cause of "Chinese restaurant syndrome," are mostly imagined.

"The data are that any kind of a toxic reaction to MSG, or an immune reaction, is very, very rare," Halpern said.

Halpern said researchers had compared reactions to MSG with those to plain gelatin capsules - the food version of a placebo.

"It's no more likely that you'll have a reaction to MSG than to a placebo," he said.

MSG's reputation has also benefited from recent taste research that has identified the chemical glutamate as essential to a fifth basic taste, akin to the tastes of sweet, sour, salty and bitter. The new taste has been named umami, a Japanese word that translates roughly as "deliciousness," and is sometimes described as a "savory" or "full" taste.

"MSG is a glutamate salt," Halpern said. "Glutamate and its salts are natural salts that are found in all sorts of things - Parmesan cheese, aged mushrooms, tomatoes," he said. "It's not that it's a totally exotic substance."