Better Than Spam!

This week's theme has become "eating our way to economic survival."

Chris Burritt at Bloomburg reports today that Campbell's soup (NYSE: CPB) has joined Hormel's spam as a port of refuge from the economic storms sweeping the globe.

The recession will make 2009 ``the year of condensed soup, driven by the backdrop of severe economic pressure on the consumer,'' Mitchell Pinheiro, a Philadelphia-based analyst at Janney Montgomery Scott LLC, wrote in a note yesterday.

The appeal of a cheap meal is turning the world's largest soupmaker, which says it sells to 85 percent of U.S. households, into an outperformer in hard times. The shares led the 12- company Standard & Poor's Packaged Foods Index over the past three months, and their 0.87 percent loss this year beat the S&P 500 by almost 48 percentage points.

Camden, New Jersey-based Campbell is ``acknowledged as a way to weather a recession,'' said Edgar Roesch, a Soleil Securities Corp. analyst in New York who rates the shares ``buy.''

Way back in the 1970's at McCann-Erickson, I worked with a guy whose father wrote Campbell's signature line, "Mmm good!" Later, the slogan morphed into the very boring, but mysteriously effective, "Soup is good food." Today I find "Nourishing people's lives everywhere, every day" on the Campbell's web site. Really boring.

For 2009, how about updating the Campbell's Soup slogan to the very timely, "Better than Spam!"

Mmm good.