The Campbell’s Company might be known for warming up cold days with its iconic red-and-white soup brand, but each warm bowl of soup would not be possible without the hard work of farmers on whom the consumer-packaged goods (CPG) giant relies on to produce its portfolio of snacks, sauces, pastas, broths, and beverages.
With farmer events that stretch back to the 1910s, Campbell’s has worked with growers through various programs designed to help growers make better in-field decisions.
The spirit of those first farmer events lives on today as Campbell’s hosts a sustainability summit for tomato growers every year, and one for the potato growers every other year, David Kiehn, director of agriculture operations at Campbell’s, told AgNavigator.
In the last four years, the CPG company has built a regen ag program around trusted food, vibrant communities, thriving people, and a healthy environment, Stewart Lindsay, chief sustainability officer at Campbell’s, told AgNavigator.
The CPG company focuses its sustainability efforts on three hero ingredients — tomatoes, potatoes, and wheat — which are not just crucial inputs to the various Campbell’s products but also their top crops that it monitors from a sustainability perspective, Lindsay noted.
Through its regen ag strategy, Campbell’s is helping farmers adapt and test a variety of sustainable farming practices from cover cropping to the use of biologicals and green fertilizers, Lindsay noted. The regen ag practices are not just good for farmers and soil health, but research has also shown that it can help with long-term profitability, he added.
Campbell’s provides financial support to farmers through grower grants and technology investments.
For instance, Campbell’s supported CSS Farms in adopting a range of regen ag practices from cover cropping to crop rotations and supporting the use of nitrogen stabilizer and shifting from diesel to solar to power irrigation systems through its Ahold Delhaize USA partnership, as the company shared in a May 2026 press release.
“If you think about the general risks to ag and food — climate variability, water scarcity, biodiversity losses — those are risks to agriculture, and they’re risks to us. And so, the best way we can address that is trying to invest with farmers to change some of their practices and bend that curve in agriculture, and over time, that should be a benefit to us,” Lindsay elaborated.
‘Growers are very much on the forefront of technology’
The CPG company and its partners rely on technology to ensure that Campbell’s supply chain runs as efficiently as possible, the two shared. On the farm level, these can include everything from tests with soil moisture sensors to drones, Kiehn noted.
“Growers are very much on the forefront of technology. They get a bad rap [from people] thinking that they don’t adapt, but they do because they’re looking to sustain these farms for generations to come,” Kiehn elaborated.
From a logistical standpoint, Campbell’s has tested forecasting tools to predict supply chain disruptions, but the company has heavily relied on its thorough data collection capabilities to estimate quality and yield, Kiehn said. Campbell’s wants to go even deeper with its data with the help of AI to measure and report Scope 3 emissions, Lindsay noted.
“What we have found that still works the best for us is our extensive data collection that we do because we have a system that keeps all of our records for every single load of tomatoes that comes in. We have a system that does for potatoes as well. And so, we can go back, and we can look at what the quality was, how much was delivered by field, by grower, and then we can map it out,” Kiehn said.
