A Campbell’s IT executive has been placed on temporary leave after a former employee accused him of making crude, discriminatory, and disparaging remarks about the company’s products and staff.
According to The Guardian, the allegations surfaced after a wrongful-termination lawsuit filed by Robert Garza, a security analyst who briefly worked for the company in late 2024.
“We have shit for fucking poor people. Who buys our shit? I don’t buy Campbell’s products anymore. It’s not healthy now that I know what the fuck‘s in it. Bioengineered meat! I don’t wanna eat a fucking piece of chicken that came from a 3-D printer,” Martin Bally, the company’s chief information security officer, allegedly said in a recording that has since circulated online.
The Campbell’s Company issued two statements in response to the leaked recording. The first called the alleged recording “unacceptable,” said that Bally is on a temporary leave, and added that it does not use lab-grown chicken.
That statement added, “Keep in mind, the alleged comments heard on the audio were made by a person in IT, who has nothing to do with how we make our food.”
The second statement focused on their chicken: “The chicken meat used in Campbell’s soups comes from long-trusted, USDA approved U.S. suppliers and meets our high quality standards,” the statement reads.
Campbell’s Soup’s signature tomato soup was invented in 1897 after John Thompson Dorrance, a chemist working for the Campbell Company, invented a novel way of condensing soup by removing a majority of the water. That combined with another scientific marvel of the time, pasteurization, which kills harmful bacteria in food, helped create the signature shelf-stable soup product we know today.
While Campbell’s Soup has long been a landmark of early American industrialism and entrepreneurship, in recent years it has become a symbol of the ultra-processed food market responsible for various negative health outcomes endemic in American society—especially in lower-resourced food deserts—including diabetes, obesity, and cardiovascular disease.
While the FDA approved lab-grown meats in 2023, companies producing it have experienced similar pushback for alleged health reasons. The health implications of such a novel product are still unclear; several states have passed bans on lab-grown meats including Mississippi, Florida, and Alabama. Other states, including Nebraska and Georgia, are considering similar regulation, The New York Times reported.
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Tekendra Parmar
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