"Adding Zest to Recipes on Labels," by Miriam Gottfried

Article and Photo courtesy: The Wall Street Journal)

Recipe developers at Campbell Soup Co. spent months testing and tasting before reaching a decision: "Chicken With Sun-Dried Tomatoes" was safe enough to print on the back of a can of cream-of-mushroom soup.

Some of the most beloved American dishes started as back-of-the-package recipes, designed in corporate test kitchens to sell more cans of soup, bags of noodles and boxes of cake mix. Campbell, for example, says 30 million "Green Bean Casseroles," a recipe created in 1955, are made using its cream-of-mushroom soup between Thanksgiving and Christmas each year.

America's increasingly sophisticated palate, influenced by TV cooking shows, celebrity chefs and gourmet ingredients, presents a problem. Food companies need to figure out how to update their recipes to entice today's more ambitious cooks to use products that might otherwise sit on the shelf for months. The recipes must make cooks feel like they're doing more than just adding eggs to a mix, but not use so many ingredients to require a special trip to the store. If they get too trendy, they risk alienating their core consumers.

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