A former Campbell Soup Company employee secretly recorded one of the company’s executives while he went on a bewildering, expletives-laden, and over-an-hour-long rant.
“We have s*** for f**king poor people,” Campbell vice president and chief information officer Martin Bally allegedly seethed in the recording, as quoted by Detroit-based news station WDIV. “Who buys our s***? I don’t buy Campbell’s products barely anymore. It’s not healthy now that I know what the f***’s in it.”
“Bioengineered meat — I don’t wanna eat a piece of chicken that came from a 3D printer,” he added.
Bally also made derogatory comments about Indian employees, calling them “idiots.”
The worker, Robert Garza, has since sued his former employer for wrongful termination after he was abruptly fired in January, mere days after raising the issue with his manager. Garza was hired remotely as a cybersecurity analyst in September 2024.
The news spread like wildfire on the internet, even catching the attention of Florida attorney general James Uthmeier, who tweeted that the state’s law “bans lab-grown meat” and that its “Consumer Protection division is launching an investigation and will demand answers from Campbell’s.”
The Campbell Soup Company has since attempted to distance itself from the situation, telling CBS News in a statement that the “person alleged to be speaking on the recording works in IT and has nothing to do with how we make our food.”
The company also addressed Bally’s explosive comments that the company allegedly used 3D-printed chicken, saying it uses “100 percent real chicken in our soups.”
“If the comments were in fact made, they are unacceptable,” the statement reads. “The comments heard on the recording about our food are not only inaccurate — they are patently absurd.”
The company also revealed that Bally is currently on leave as it conducts an investigation.
But the damage had already been done, raising more questions than answers. What “bioengineered meat” was Barry talking about? Is Campbell’s currently testing lab-grown meat for use in its products? Could he be referring to a different meat alternative?
Lab-grown meat is made by culturing real animal cells inside bioreactors and differs from plant-based meat alternatives, like products by Beyond Meat and Impossible Foods. It’s intended to reduce our reliance on raising and slaughtering animals, while simultaneously lowering the carbon footprint of meat.
Despite billions of dollars being poured into developing the idea, though, only a handful of restaurants having served lab-grown meat around the world, the concept has yet to catch on in the mainstream, with experts warning that it could still take many years before it hits major grocery stores.
Cultivated meat remains extremely costly to produce, making it vastly more expensive than traditional meat products. Critics have also pointed out that its environmental footprint may actually be much higher than regular meat.
As Uthmeier’s comments highlight, it has also become a politicized issue, with Republicans looking to ban lab-grown meat outright, arguing it’s unnatural and could put livestock farmers out of work. Montana and Nebraska joined Indiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Florida, Texas, and Wyoming in attempting to stop the sale of cellular meat.
Nonetheless, companies continue to investigate the meat alternative. So far, the US Food and Drug Administration has approved three companies to sell lab-reared animal cells for public consumption. Mission Barns, which received approval in March, has managed to bring a meatball product to market for just $13.99 in a store in Berkeley, California.
Whether we’ll ever see lab-grown meat ending up in cans of Campbell’s soup remains to be seen. Judging by Bally’s cryptic rant — and putting aside his deplorable commentary for a second — it’s clear that the idea has at least penetrated the company in some form.
More on lab-grown meat: New Startup Harvests Bacon Without Killing Pig