How Campbell’s soup led to a whole new variety of tomatoes

Campbell Soup Co. (called Joseph Campbell & Co. at the time) canned the first batch of its now-famous tomato soup in the late 19th century. Over 125 years later, the soup can still be found in nearly every grocery store in America. Its lesser known legacy? The company’s tomato breeding program, writes Modern Farmer. As the soup grew in popularity in the early 1900s, Campbell’s realized it needed a reliable source of tomatoes that would be uniform in taste and size. To achieve that, the company launched its tomato breeding program in 1910, and built a research facility in the 1930s that helped establish New Jersey as an important agricultural center for the fruit. The most famous breed to come from Campbell’s research is the Rutgers tomato, which was grown by 72 percent of U.S. commercial tomato farmers at one point but eventually lost popularity in the 1950s and ‘60s; thin skin made it a poor choice for farmers increasingly relying on mechanical harvesters. That breed was believed to be lost by the 21st century, until researchers discovered seed stocks stored in a Campbell’s vault. A re-bred version of the Rutgers tomato was reintroduced in 2016, and is now a wildly popular heirloom variety with gardeners. —Jessica Terrell