A founder, a town south of Portland and a broth.

Pacific Foods was founded by Chuck Eggert in 1987 in Tualatin, Oregon, a town on the southern edge of the Portland metropolitan area. The date and place appear in two independent records written three years apart: an interview with Eggert by Hannah Wallace in Oregon Business, published on 6 March 2014, and the press release Campbell Soup Company issued on 12 December 2017 when it completed its purchase of the business, which said that Pacific Foods was “Founded in 1987 in Tualatin, Ore.”

Wallace opened her interview by placing the company in its time. When Eggert founded Pacific Foods, she wrote, the health-food movement was still an offshoot of the hippie culture of the 1970s. By 2014 she was describing a privately held, Tualatin-based natural-foods company, and Eggert told her that the national trade had changed out of recognition since he began, recalling a Natural Products Expo where in the early days he had known virtually everyone in the hall.

The interview set out what the company made by then. Wallace listed broths, soups and chowders, along with what Pacific called “soup starters”, non-dairy drinks such as almond and hazelnut milk, and refried beans and macaroni and cheese. Asked which products were most popular, Eggert named two: chicken broth and roasted red pepper soup. He said that Oregon itself was a small market for the company, and that California and the Northeast were large ones; he described Pacific as having flown under the radar in its home state.

Eggert also described an unusually long supply chain under the company’s own control. He told Oregon Business that Pacific raised a significant share of its chickens itself and worked with a poultry supplier in Dayton, Oregon, where a meat-processing plant, Dayton Natural Meats, handled poultry, pork, beef, turkey and duck. The meat, he said, was brought to the Tualatin facility, made into broth there and packaged there. He said that the milk used in some of the soups, including the roasted red pepper and the tomato soups, came from dairies his family owned in the Willamette Valley and in Burns, and that the company was trying to source feed for both its poultry and its cows within Oregon.

One story from that interview concerns a hatchery. Eggert said that the Jenks Hatchery in Talent, Oregon, had closed at a time when larger chicken producers were consolidating their hatching, and that Pacific’s poultry manager, Reg Keddie, went to talk to its owners and helped get it running again to supply chicks to Pacific. He added that the company was gradually moving its flocks to heirloom breeds, including the Naked Neck.

A sale to Campbell in 2017.

Pacific Foods remained a private Oregon company for three decades. That ended in December 2017. In its press release dated 12 December 2017, issued from its headquarters in Camden, New Jersey, Campbell Soup Company announced that it had completed the acquisition of Pacific Foods of Oregon. Campbell described Pacific as a producer of broth and soup that also made shelf-stable plant-based beverages and other meals and sides, and said that Pacific operated what Campbell called a certified organic plant, where it produced its namesake products.

The release placed the new business inside Campbell’s Americas Simple Meals and Beverages division, which it said was led by Mark Alexander and included Campbell’s soup, simple meals and shelf-stable beverage units in the United States and Canada. Campbell listed the division’s other brands as Campbell’s, V8, Swanson, Prego, Pace and Plum Organics, so that Pacific sat in the same division as another broth brand.

Campbell also named the person who would run the business. Joe Folds, the release said, became vice president and general manager of Pacific Foods; he had been with Campbell since 1997, most recently in a strategy and global-brands role in its biscuits and snacks business. Campbell said it planned to expand Pacific’s distribution, increase marketing support for the brand, and invest in research and development and in the supply chain, and that it would immediately begin to integrate Pacific’s key functions.

The buyer framed the purchase in Pacific’s own language. Mark Alexander was quoted as saying that Pacific was “an authentic brand with a real food philosophy”, and that Campbell aimed to help it grow while continuing what the release called its purpose-driven mission: “to make nourishing foods with simple, organic ingredients”. Campbell’s then chief executive, Denise Morrison, was quoted describing Pacific as a respected organic brand.

The change of owner shows on the company’s websites. A copy of pacificfoods.com archived by the Internet Archive in 2012 carried a copyright line for Pacific Foods of Oregon, Inc.; the current site, fetched in October 2026, carries a 2026 copyright line for Pacific Foods. Campbell has owned Pacific Foods since 2017.

Design and documentation.

The brands in this group are American pasta-sauce, soup and broth names, the kind sold from the pantry aisle in jars, cans and cartons rather than made fresh in a kitchen. Many began with a person or a place — a family recipe, a restaurant, a hotel dining room or a small regional company — and several have since passed through large food groups, sometimes more than once.

On the shelf, these brands are usually recognised before they are read. A jar label with a family name or a painted scene, a can with a long-kept colour band, or a carton with a plain sans-serif name can carry a brand further than any single recipe. Many lean on a founding story, using a surname, a city or a restaurant to promise that what is in the pack still tastes as it did where it began.

Each guide separates what independent sources record from what the company says about itself — who founded the brand, who owns it now, where its products are made and how its labels and advertising have changed — and marks plainly what rests only on the company’s own word.

Provenance as the visual argument.

Pacific Foods has presented itself through its working methods more than through a character or slogan. The company’s website in the early 2010s summed up its aim in one line — “We have one simple goal- to make tasty, healthy foods with integrity” — and linked from it to a page on what it called its philosophy. The same archived site ran a blog whose subject tags ranged from soup starters and vegetarian soups to volunteering at the Oregon Food Bank, a Tualatin charity closet and ideas for reusing soup cartons, which shows how closely the company tied its packaging and its home town to the brand.

The name itself is plain. The brand trades as Pacific Foods, and in the company’s legal name, as Campbell’s release and the archived website both give it, the words “of Oregon” are added. In the 2014 interview Eggert spoke of the company’s ties to its home state at length, from the hatchery in Talent to the dairies in the Willamette Valley and Burns, and the company’s blog of the early 2010s carried the same local thread, with posts tagged for Tualatin and for the Oregon Food Bank.

Eggert’s 2014 interview also explains why the company’s identity leaned on provenance. He described the business as built around its own farms, dairies and processing plants in Oregon, and spoke about heirloom chickens raised outdoors and feed grown within the state; he argued in the same interview that organic food was anything but elitist. Campbell’s 2017 release picked up the same thread, using Pacific’s mission statement and its description of “simple, organic ingredients” as the company’s own words rather than Campbell’s.

After the sale, Pacific joined the Campbell portfolio under its own name, and it still runs its own website. Campbell said at the time of the purchase that it intended to boost marketing support for brand building and to expand the brand’s distribution.

For a design guide, Pacific Foods shows how a regional company can make its supply chain and its home state the substance of a brand, and keep that story after joining a much older soup company. Compare it with Campbell’s, its owner since 2017, and Swanson, the broth brand it now sits beside. For this guide we use Willamette green and roasted pepper on carton kraft with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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