Campbell Soup opens new building at NJ headquarters amid debate over office park development

Campbell Soup gets new face in its NJ hometown

CAMDEN, N.J. — The Campbell Soup Co. made good Thursday on its promise not to abandon its impoverished hometown, opening a showy new building at its headquarters.

But despite major efforts, the food company is having a harder time accomplishing something else it pledged to do for the city: turn a swath of land near its property into an office park to bring other companies, jobs and tax revenues to the city.

Campbell says developers don’t want to build as long as a historic but dilapidated former Sears store remains in the area — right between busy Admiral Wilson Boulevard and the Campbell headquarters.

Campbell CEO Doug Conant is frustrated that seven years have passed and the company still is unable to reach a deal to buy the building, and its owner has failed to rejuvenate it.

The company has encouraged the city to obtain and raze the structure.

“Our view is that the Sears building should be either fully developed or removed,” Conant said. “The owners have not done anything with it.”

When the Anderson & Campbell Preserve Co. was formed in Camden in 1869, the city was a booming industrial hub.

It would be home to RCA, the New York Shipbuilding Corp. and, by 1950, nearly 125,000 people. But since then, most of the big companies and more than 40 percent of the population have left.

Even decidedly local institutions like the city’s newspaper and Catholic high school have fled over the decades as the city has become one of the poorest and most crime-ridden places in the country. Sears left its colossal building in the city for a suburban mall in 1971.

The building left behind has been turned into a night club, a car dealership and other enterprises. But none lasted long.

Campbell has stayed, even though it shut down its last plant in the city 20 years ago.

By the middle of the last decade, though, Campbell was considering moving too. Its parking lots were protected by barbed-wire fences; the neighborhood was full of abandoned buildings and vacant lots, some strewn with junked cars.

But in 2007, the Fortune 500 company announced a new plan. It would stay, expand, and launch the office park — as long as the state and other government entities helped. They have, putting more than $23 million into road-building and environmental cleanup costs at the 100-acre plot Campbell wants to remake.

Campbell has bought parcels and cleaned them up. Including its own building, the company has spent $93 million on the project so far.

The new building features a 280-foot-long red wall emblazoned with the familiar “Campbell’s” script logo.

To Campbell officials, opening the new building proves that the company is true to its word.

Ilan Zaken, who bought the Sears building for $2.8 million in 2007, said at the time that he wanted the building to become home to his companies. They include the retail chain Dr. Denim and the hip-hop-oriented clothes firm Miskeen Originals. But that plan didn’t happen. Neither did the idea to make it a data storage center.

Zaken, who did not return a call Thursday, has a new concept: Turning the facility into a marketplace for restaurant equipment dealers, plus adding a culinary school.

Some businesses have signed on as tenants. And work has been done on the building, including replacement of the roof and interior gutting. Tony Merlino, who’s overseeing the work, hopes it can be running by early next year.

But Campbell doubts the plan will materialize.

Some community activists want to save the building, which was added to state and national historic registers when it was threatened about a decade ago.

Mary Cortes is a teacher at a school for dropouts who intends to open a restaurant linens business in a restored Sears building. She says Zaken’s vision could deliver more jobs for Camden residents than an office park. To her, providing those jobs is at least as important as saving the building.

“It will look very bad for Campbell to step on another person’s idea,” she said. “Campbell is considered a bully at this moment.”

Last week, Cortes started a boycott of Campbell.

On Thursday, though, dozens of leaders of other Camden nonprofit groups joined the party to open Campbell’s new building.