School life / Labels for Education, 1973–2018
For 45 Years, Soup Labels Were School Money
Campbell's Labels for Education ran from 1973 to 2018. Families clipped, schools redeemed, and one parent saved the wrong labels for years.
In November 1973 the local paper in Delmar, New York, ran a community notice for Glenmont Elementary School. The Campbell Soup Company was sponsoring a program. Families should save the labels from any Campbell's soup can, regular, 26-ounce, 50-ounce or Chunky, and mail them in or give them to a Glenmont student by December 8. "Some things there are that tax monies just don't buy," the notice said. The labels would buy equipment.
It was, the notice promised, a plan that would cost "absolutely nothing." All you had to do was remember to take the label off every can as you used it.
All you had to do was remember. That is the most expensive phrase in parenting.
Campbell's says Labels for Education started that year. By 2005 a company press release listed what labels could be redeemed for: computers, software, sports equipment, educational videos, and passenger vans.
A van. Somewhere in America, a school van was paid for in soup.
In 2006, on a parents' forum, one poster described a small disaster. They had been saving Campbell's labels since their son was born, waiting for him to start school. Then they found out the school collected Box Tops, a different program. Wrong currency. They kept saving the labels anyway. Another poster, whose schools didn't take soup labels, offered to collect them for someone else's school in exchange for Box Tops.
A foreign-exchange market, conducted entirely in packaging.
In June 2018 the parent organization at the Fall River schools in Wisconsin put a notice in its newsletter. It thanked families for collecting Campbell's labels "for years (decades?)" and said the program had ended. Labels could no longer be submitted.
We have a drawer. It started with Box Tops, when the eldest was in kindergarten, and has since absorbed rubber bands, birthday candles, a key to nothing and four soup labels that the middle one clipped in 2022 after reading about this, on the grounds that the program might come back.
My wife has twice tried to clean the drawer. Both times the youngest stood in front of it and explained that it is for the school. She does not know which school. She is sure it is for the school.
The drawer stays. Some things there are that tax monies just don't buy, and one of them is a drawer nobody is allowed to clean.
Sources
The public records, school pages and published accounts this story draws on. Where the story imagines a scene or a line of dialogue, that is the column’s telling, not a quotation.
- The Spotlight, November1,1973, p51: Glenmont Labels for Education appeal webapps.bethlehempubliclibrary.org
- Campbell company release, August10,2005: Labels for Education and National PTA thecampbellscompany.com
- DISboards, September22,2006: parents discussing Campbell soup labels and Box Tops disboards.com
- Fall River School District, Pirate Press, June2018, p14: PPO newsletter files-backend.assets.thrillshare.com