There are very few long-running products with decades of history that are fundamentally the same as they were when they first introduced to the market. Campbell's Tomato Soup is one of them, with a history that stretches back to the final years of the nineteenth century.

2025 marks the 128th year in which Americans can go to a grocery store and buy a can of Campbell's condensed tomato soup. When the Campbell's Company (NYSE: CPB) first produced the product, it was revolutionary. John Dorrance's innovation of condensing soup, removing water while preserving the flavor, made it possible to produce, can, store, and ship much larger quantities of soup than ever before. Consumers only needed to pour the contents of the can into a pot on their stove and add water to transform it into their next meal.

Campbell's Condensed Tomato Soup quickly became the most popular of the first soups the company produced and shipped to grocery stores across the entire United States by train and truck. Today, it is Campbell's second-most popular soup, selling around 84 million cans a year and lagging only behind the company's equally iconic Chicken Noodle Soup, which was introduced in the 1930s.

In 1898, consumers could buy a Number 1 (10.75 oz) size can of Campbell's Condensed Tomato Soup for just 10 cents. Today, consumers can walk into a Walmart and buy the exact same size can of Campbell's Condensed Tomato Soup for $1.26.

The consistency of Campbell's Tomato Soup as a product over the 128 years it has been available for consumers to buy makes it an ideal product to follow to understand how inflation has affected the prices Americans pay at the grocery store. There's no "shrinkflation" for marketers to hide the price increases that have taken place for the product over time.

Political Calculations has documented the typical price Americans have paid for a single iconic can of Campbell's Condensed Tomato Soup in each month starting from January 1898 by going through more than twelve decades worth of archived newspapers and advertising circulars to identify the prices at which grocers have put them on sale. Today we're updating that price history in our chart visualizing that history from January 1898 through January 2025.

We find the prevailing average sale price for this food product over the past 12 months is $1.28 per can, which is 3.2% higher than what we found a year earlier. The rate at which the price of a can of Campbell's Tomato Soup has been inflating in recent years has slowed, but has not stopped escalating.

The 2025 average price of a can of Campbell's Tomato Soup is about 35% higher than the trailing 12 month average of $0.95 per can we recorded in January 2022.

During this time, we've seen discounted sales of Campbell's Condensed Tomato Soup become both smaller and less frequent. Before March 2021, which marks Month 0 for when President Biden's inflation was unleashed upon the U.S. economy, it was rare to see the regular sale price of a can of Campbell's Condensed Tomato Soup above one dollar. In January 2025, the lowest price at which American consumers can expect to pay for a can when they find it is the $1.25 price at Food Lion grocery stores, which is discounted from a regular price of $1.58 per can.

Here's the January 2025 update for our periodic sampling of Campbell's Condensed Tomato Soup sale prices at 10 major U.S. grocery-selling retailers, where we're indicated the change in price since our last update in October 2024:

• Walmart: $1.26/each, unchanged
• Amazon: $2.19/each, increase of $0.20 (+10%)
• Kroger: $1.39/each, unchanged
• Walgreens: $1.99/each, unchanged
• Target: $1.39/each, unchanged
• CVS: $2.49/each, unchanged
• Albertsons: $1.49/each, unchanged
• Food Lion: $1.25/each, unchanged
• H-E-B: $1.31/each, unchanged
• Meijer: $1.29/each, unchanged

Campbell's Condensed Tomato Soup costs about 12.8 times more than the original price American grocery shoppers paid when Campbell's began selling their just-invented condensed soup products in 1898. Because its price history now spans more than a full order of magnitude, showing the price history in logarithmic scale gives a better sense of how much and when inflation has affected the prices American consumers pay for a can of Campbell's Condensed Tomato Soup.

The escalation of Campbell's Condensed Tomato Soup since March 2021 is consistent with how food prices have generally changed over this time.

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