School life / Labels for Education, 1973–2018
Please do not throw away the school’s lunch
For decades, families saved soup labels that were almost school equipment.
In a 2006 online forum, one parent reported a small domestic catastrophe. They had been saving soup labels since their son was born, waiting for school to start. Then they learned the school collected Box Tops, a separate scheme. Wrong currency. They kept saving anyway. Once you have trained yourself to rescue a piece of packaging, throwing it away feels faintly disloyal.
Back to 1973, briefly. That is when, Campbell’s says, Labels for Education began. The deal was simple: schools collected the labels and traded them for equipment.
A November 1973 appeal from Glenmont Elementary School in New York shows the pitch. It asked families for labels from any Campbell’s soup can, by mail or handed to a Glenmont student, before December 8. Some things, the school said, tax money does not buy; labels would help it purchase needed equipment.
The appeal called it a plan that would cost families “absolutely nothing,” so long as somebody remembered to remove the label. Remembering is the invisible job attached to every visible job. You have cooked lunch, served lunch, and cleared lunch. Now please preserve the educational component of lunch.
The inconvenience of the whole business was its scale. One tiny scrap of paper is easy to mislay. A household’s worth eventually needs a place that nobody is allowed to clean.
By 2005, a company release said computers, sports equipment, and passenger vans were available for label redemption. Yes, vans. The soup had ambitions well beyond lunch. I would have been content if it came with crackers, but apparently it was considering a career in transportation.
Back in that thread, another poster had proposed a swap: their schools did not collect soup labels, so they would collect some and mail them to a school that did, for Box Tops in return. A kitchen had produced perfectly good school currency; surely it could cross the border. The collection had left the pantry and acquired foreign relations.
The program did end. In its June 2018 newsletter, the parent organization at Fall River schools in Wisconsin thanked families who had collected Campbell’s labels for years, wondering aloud whether it was decades, and said labels could no longer be submitted. The same page also carried a Box Tops reminder.
I hope those families enjoyed their first unremarkable empty can. No equipment riding on it. No careful rescue operation. Just lunch, finally allowed to be finished.