'We Need to Win.' Inside the Five-Year Quest to Reinvent the Goldfish. -- WSJ

By Jesse Newman | Photography and Video by Cam McLeod for WSJ

Inside Campbell's headquarters this past March, executives stared at a problem: Their new gluten-free Goldfish crackers looked like sharks.

The smile was all wrong too. The specialty Goldfish had a menacing quality.

"It was more like if you've ever seen 'Jaws,'" says George Vindiola, who leads research and development at Campbell's. "Like the look of the great white shark."

Brian Hannigan, Campbell's head of innovation, told Vindiola's team to try again. Their first large-scale production run was unacceptable.

"This is probably not the Goldfish experience that we want to be giving to kids," Hannigan recalls thinking.

Gluten, it turned out, gives dough a springy, elastic quality. Once the dough is cut, regular Goldfish contract, snapping back into the classic, plump fish shape before baking. But the gluten-free dough, made without wheat, stayed stretched out.

Vindiola, who has worked for 30 years in R&D, agreed to try. He had figured out how to add white chocolate to Pepperidge Farm Milano cookies and put pepperoncini into Kettle Brand potato chips but this was tougher. He warned Hannigan there was no guarantee his team could fix the fish in time for their planned launch on grocery store shelves in November.

The difference between a cracker that smiles and one that doesn't seems tiny -- roughly five mm, in fact. But for old-line food makers like Campbell's, getting any sales growth is so hard that gains can be measured in millimeters.

Campbell's, known for the red-and-white cans of soup that Andy Warhol turned into Pop art, faces particular challenges. Eating habits have changed. People aren't eating as much canned soups and packaged snacks, its two main businesses. Fresher foods and newer brands are where the growth is. The company is on track to post its fourth consecutive annual decline in comparable sales this year. Its stock has fallen 29% over the past year.

So the soup-and-snack maker is cutting costs. As part of its goal to eliminate $500 million in costs by fiscal 2030, Campbell's has cut more than 550 jobs, or roughly 13% of its salaried workforce. It closed its factory on Cape Cod in Massachusetts that makes Cape Cod potato chips. And it plans to slash its quarterly dividend to 25 cents a share, down 36% from its prior dividend of 39 cents a share.

Campbell's chief executive Mick Beekhuizen is also trying to update the company's core products. Goldfish is one of its four biggest brands, with $1 billion in annual sales. Campbell's snack sales have fallen for the past three fiscal years, on a comparable basis.

"With Goldfish, we need to grow, we need to win," Beekhuizen told investors in September.

Goldfish were the brainchild of Oscar Kambly, a Swiss baker who created the cracker in 1958 as a birthday gift for his wife -- a Pisces -- whose astrological sign was a fish.

Pepperidge Farm founder Margaret Rudkin discovered Goldfish while on vacation in Europe and in 1962 licensed the crackers to sell in the U.S., marketing them as a bar snack for adults. Campbell's had newly acquired Pepperidge Farm and began promoting Goldfish. Astronauts brought them to space aboard the Space Shuttle Discovery in 1988. About a decade later, Campbell's added a smiley face to many Goldfish varieties and the bar snack became a ubiquitous kids' snack.

Since then, Campbell's, based in Camden, NJ, has struggled to adapt to changing consumer tastes that have buffeted the food industry.

As sales of other products lagged, Goldfish was a bright spot. Demand was so strong that Campbell's in 2023 decided to invest $160 million to add a new production line at its Richmond, Utah, plant. The line, built to produce over five million Goldfish per hour, would increase the plant's Goldfish output by 50% percent. It marked the company's third capacity expansion for Goldfish in two years, Campbell's said at the time.

Goldfish buyers were evenly split between households with and without kids, says Janda Lukin, Campbell's chief growth officer. The Covid pandemic had closed schools and fewer snacks were being packed in lunchboxes or for after-school activities -- so Campbell's decided to focus more on adults. The company debuted Goldfish Mega Bites, which are 50% bigger than the original, and new, limited-edition flavors like Frank's RedHot, Old Bay and Jalapeño Popper.

"It's come to our attention that some people think Goldfish crackers are just for kids," said a 2024 Goldfish ad online. "Well, what if we call them "Chilean Sea Bass?"

Campbell's that year forecast that Goldfish would reach $1.3 billion in sales by fiscal 2027.

The company's timing was poor. By the time the factory expansion was complete in 2024, Goldfish sales volumes had slowed, according to a BNP Paribas analysis of NIQ data. Declines have worsened recently, falling 5% versus year-ago levels in the four weeks ended Oct. 3, the data shows.

So Campbell's reversed course on Goldfish. In its March earnings call, CEO Beekhuizen said the company would once again focus on families with kids.

Campbell's introduced limited-edition Goldfish in the shape of four Pokémon characters in June. It decided to appeal to parents looking for healthier snacks that kids will eat with three new varieties -- with added protein, whole grains and gluten-free. And it updated its packaging to highlight that Goldfish have long been made with 100% real cheese and no artificial colors or flavors.

Creating a gluten-free Goldfish has been the request it gets the most often, Campbell's says.

The company first tried five years ago to create a cracker that people who avoid gluten could eat, said Vindiola, the research and development head. But, in tests, the gluten-free cracker -- made with a blend of rice flour, tapioca flour, cornstarch and potato starch instead of wheat -- tasted bland. Campbell's also faced hurdles because it didn't have gluten-free plants or production lines so it couldn't prevent cross-contamination with wheat flour used in its other Goldfish.

The company decided to try again, calling the effort "Project Emma" after a 10-year-old girl named Emma Livingston who wrote to Campbell's last year asking for a gluten-free Goldfish for her sister with celiac disease.

"My sister is just one of the millions of kids that have celiac," Livingston wrote in her letter, a copy of which was reviewed by The Wall Street Journal. "If more people buy your product, you'd obviously make even more money than you do right now."

This time, Campbell's ran into problems with its dough. The gluten-free mixture was too sticky to pass through the rollers that flatten the dough into sheets. Employees tweaked the recipe, adjusting the amount and timing of the water they added and how long they mixed the dough.

The gluten-free Goldfish baked up nicely in Campbell's pilot.

But things went haywire when the company tried to produce the crackers at scale. To save time, Campbell's hired a third-party manufacturer to make the cracker, rather than retool its own facilities. The first run at that plant in March produced the sharks with an evil-looking grin.

"They weren't like a typical Goldfish that has a nice blunt nose and has the eyes and smiles," Vindiola says.

With the next and last run scheduled for May, Campbell's R&D team redesigned the cutter, adjusting its size and the depth and curve of the fish's smile. If their calculations were still off, the company could miss its window for a fall launch in grocery stores.

But the new cutters worked, producing Goldfish in their classic shape with their signature smile. Gluten-free Goldfish are slightly crispier than the traditional crackers, executives said, but otherwise the cheddar cheese and spice taste is the same. Campbell's convinced grocers to give it the retail Holy Grail -- space on store shelves to sell gluten-free Goldfish alongside its regular varieties. The specialty crackers will go on sale in the coming weeks.

Beekhuizen told investors in September that sales of its core, cheddar Goldfish were improving, though they are still declining overall. The company recently launched a new marketing campaign, bringing back its old "Snack That Smiles Back" jingle, and is investing in more family-oriented options like multipacks.

"I'm encouraged by Goldfish, but we have much more work to do," Beekhuizen said.

-- Photography and Video assisting by Dylan Totaro

(END) Dow Jones Newswires

October 30, 2026 22:00 ET (02:00 GMT)