Canned heat

It's said that when Andy Warhol painted 50 Campbell's soup cans on a canvas back in 1968, he wasn't making a grand artistic statement; he just liked soup.

Forty years on, his Campbell's 'portraits' are making $12M a time and we still like soup, but tastes have changed and fortunes in the ambient sector are harder to come by. The tinned soup market is struggling to live up to its iconic status, while chillers crowded with potted, pouched and Tetrapaked newcomers are pushing fresh sales up by nearly 10% a year - that's more than tinned soup's seen in five.

Even food monitor Mintel, usually a reliable harbinger of fortunes, predicts its decline and says that, notwithstanding the flurry of premium, low-cal and clean label activity from category stalwarts like Baxters, "the image of the tinned soup has begun to look dated". So why have Premier (which bought the Campbell's brand last year) and Heinz been spending so much time, not to mention money, on it?

The answer might lie in new technology that promises to propel cans out of their Sixties time warp into a faster food era. Work going on in Europe could see the first microwaveable tinned soup appearing as early as April, rejuvenating a category that to all appearances hasn't changed since Warhol's day.

Manufacturers haven't altered its image, because consumers view canned soup as iconic, says Tony Woods, director of the UK Metal Packaging Manufacturers' Association. The group's members have been working hard on helping wet ambient soup makers maintain their dominant, but not unassailable, £265M share. "You have easy-open ends to make them more convenient and stock-pot shape for chunky soup and bowl-shaped with pull-foil closures ... if they were to be microwaveable, then bingo, you've something that hits all the spots."

No wonder Heinz was sanguine about its disastrous foray into chilled soups and so bullish about its recent £7M investment in its tinned Classic, Big, Special and Weight Watchers brands, which hit the shelves last winter with a range of mostly vegetarian varieties.

"Eighty per cent of households are still purchasing soup in cans," it says, "and the results of every piece of consumer research Heinz has undertaken show that cans are the favourable packaging option."

Deborah Carter, client director with consultancy Dragon Brands, which recently worked with Campbell's on its range, says it's about time tinned soup manufacturers took a more can-do approach. She believes features of the canning process once perceived as attributes are now distinct handicaps, especially since fresh brands, such as Covent Garden, began stealing the healthy high ground by making a virtue of short shelf-life.

"You buy your tin of Heinz Tomato and you know it will always taste the same, but the fact that it has such a long shelf-life is not doing it any favours compared with chilled, which says it has such fresh ingredients you have to consume within 10 days. Is it necessary to put a two-year shelf-life on a can? Might it be better to put three months?" asks Carter.

"They're also missing a trick on ease-of-opening and storage. As a consumer, I don't want to leave things in a can because of taint. So why not have cans that are OK to leave in the fridge, maybe sealing them with a plastic lid, like cream?"

Self-heating cans - already trialled with hot beverages - and square tins, which made a brief appearance among the tomato soups at Sainsbury, are already on the horizon, pressing the twin big buttons of convenience and environmental awareness, says Woods.

"The Premiers and Baxters of this world - the big boys - have long-term commitment to the canned format. Increasingly, the political and social importance behind energy use favours the can. Square cans make absolute sense in terms of utilising shelf-space and transport - areas I personally believe will become much more important in the future."

In the past, chilled soup companies' dynamic new product development has shaken up the traditional winter warmer and brought fresh hope to the category, seducing soup virgins with ladles' full of sexy designer combinations, such as parsnip and Scottish heather honey and Thai noodle with king prawns. But now, even the chilled proponents are hinting that consumers are plain tuckered out by all the excitement.

"Whereas innovation was largely led by finding some exciting new ingredient, the soups that are most successful for us now are naturally simple that consumers understand - one ingredient soups," says Nigel Parrott, group marketing director for New Covent Garden. "The reality is, keep it simple, not because the consumer is simple, it's just the need to push the boundaries on food taste in terms of extensions seems to be waning. The more creative you get, the less successful you are."

Despite keeping more than 80 different varieties on the boil at any one time, Bill Morran, joint owner of the chilled food service and retail supply company TSC, is inclined to agree. "People's preferences are for the five soups they can rattle off - vegetable, tomato, tomato and basil, chicken and mushroom," he says. "But what we are certainly finding, in food service at least, is a lot more steer towards provenance."

TSC's commercial director Mark Allibone explains: "Where we used to do Broccoli and Cheese, we now have Broccoli and Torr Valley Cheddar. Instead of Leek and Potato, there's Leek and Maris Piper. There are lots of reasons why provenance has become important; it's about feeling local, even if "local" means your country, and that's linked to the mega global trend in health. People feel that locally sourced, itemised ingredients must be good for them."

Piggy backing on another brand with reputable origins also helps, he explains. "Rather than soup with stout, it's Murphy's Soup, for instance."

New Covent Garden, which was one of the first to recognise consumers' hunger for authenticity, has responded to taste fatigue by matching its traditional culinary inventiveness with some creative writing on-pack, regularly refreshing the story about its ingredients and their place of origin. This is often neatly linked to premium consumers' popular holiday destinations. The company also endorses its fresh image with monthly specials that have helped flatten out the category's notoriously cyclical sales habits.

But soup firms have been less quick to cash in on the growth in functional foods. While nearby drinks chillers are bouncing with added vitamins and minerals, soups remain resolutely au naturelle. "Consumers already believe soup is intrinsically healthy for them and you don't want to undermine that with add-ons, but I could see a range of fish soups with omega-3 or a creamy range with calcium," says Carter. "I think it's more about talking up their natural healthiness though."

In Germany, Nestlé's top-selling Maggi Feel Good brand has been successfully marketing dried soups fortified with vitamins C and E since 2002, but with packet soup in the UK shrinking faster than a dehydrated onion, the chances of a new launch here are slim.

Instead, manufacturers have concentrated on developing low-fat, low-salt ranges, while at the same time making a meal of indulgence. Waitrose launched Celeriac and Parmesan with celeriac crisps last year, while recently some own brands have been marketing soups from which the vegetable components have been separated out.

"We've done what are called top hat soups in the past, such as gazpacho with chopped cucumber to add in," says Allibone. "There are certain soups with a two taste process that lend themselves to that, but you've got to get the great unwashed to understand what they are supposed to do with it."

Carter believes it goes beyond the token shake and swirl. Manufacturers in all categories should be souping it up, she says. "There's definitely more opportunity for making soups a meal occasion and more ideas needed, especially for family soups and wholesome lines now that there's a blurring of the boundaries between what's soup, what's risotto and what's stew."

Allibone is putting his money on Mediterranean flavours and, what the trade terms somewhat bizarrely, Light Asia. Both of these trends are intrinsically healthier than a scotch broth, in the consumers' mind at least.

And once they've thoroughly stirred the savoury pot, what about fruit soups for dessert?

"Absolutely not," says Allibone, who claims his customers were left cold by chilled chocolate and strawberry soups. "The British public just don't get it [the concept] and we never will. They might look great in the Sunday supplements, but they're never going to be more than a miniature niche, not even with global warming and certainly not in my lifetime."

Carter is not so sure. "I cannot imagine a fruit soup next to tomato and basil and carrot and coriander. It would be a brave manufacturer to do it and a brave retailer to put it there, but with the growth in fruit and vegetable smoothies, that's not to say it couldn't come through a different route: I can see a Müller fruit soup, for instance."

Much more Picasso than Warhol, wouldn't you agree? FM