Few foods feel more comforting than a bowl of soup heated straight from a can. For generations, it's been the go-to lunch, the sick-day remedy, and the casserole helper. But canned soup didn't start in American kitchens. It started with armies, navies, and explorers heading into the ice.
Food canning took off in the early 1800s, mainly to feed soldiers and sailors. One of the earliest recorded canned soups was pea soup, which British explorer Sir William Edward Parry took on his 1824 Arctic voyage aboard HMS Fury. Canned soup didn't become a cheap everyday food until much later, after a young chemist at Campbell's figured out how to condense it in 1897.
A Prize for Preserving Food
The story begins in France. Shortly before the Napoleonic Wars, the French government offered 12,000 francs to anyone who could find a cheap, reliable way to preserve food for its armies. Food shortages had long limited military campaigns mostly to the summer and autumn. A confectioner named Nicolas Appert noticed that food cooked inside a sealed jar didn't spoil unless the seal leaked. He won the prize in 1810.
Nobody knew why it worked. It would be about 50 years before Louis Pasteur showed that microbes cause food to spoil.
Meanwhile, the idea moved to England, where Bryan Donkin and John Hall developed a way of packing food in sealed cans made of tinned iron. Each can was handmade and could take up to six hours to cook, so canned food was far too expensive for ordinary families. The British Army and Royal Navy were the main customers.
Soup for the Frozen North
Canned food was perfect for long voyages. When Parry sailed into the Arctic in 1824 in search of the Northwest Passage, he packed canned beef and pea soup. Other polar explorers, including Sir John Franklin in 1845, carried canned food too. Some of Franklin's food stores were found by a search expedition in 1857.
There was just one problem: getting inside. Early cans were so sturdy they could weigh more than the food in them. The instructions read: "Cut round the top near the outer edge with a chisel and hammer." The first can openers weren't patented until 1855 in England and 1858 in the United States.
Campbell's Big Idea: Less Water
In America, the Campbell company was founded in 1869 in New Jersey by Joseph A. Campbell, a fruit merchant, and Abraham Anderson, who made iceboxes. They canned tomatoes, vegetables, jellies, soups, and more.
The breakthrough came in 1897, when John T. Dorrance, a chemist and nephew of the company's president, joined the firm at $7.50 a week. He developed a practical way to condense soup by cutting out half of its heaviest ingredient: water. The cans were smaller and cheaper to ship, and at home you simply added water to double the volume. Dorrance later became company president.
A Can That Became Art
In 1898, a Campbell's executive chose the famous red and white colors after admiring the Cornell University football team's uniforms. The gold-toned medal on the label comes from the 1900 Paris Exhibition, and the design has barely changed since.
In 1962, artist Andy Warhol turned that label into pop art with a series of 32 canvases. Not bad for a food that began as a ration for sailors chipping open cans with a hammer.
