Campbell’s VP Blasts Customers—And He’s Not the First Exec to Do It

Campbell’s corporate is in hot water, and this time it’s not in the saucepan.

On November 21, news broke that a former Campbell’s employee named Robert Garza is suing the company for wrongful termination. He alleges that he was fired for recording vp and chief information security officer Martin Bally disparaging the company’s products customers.

Bally reportedly said that Campbell’s sells “sh-t for f***ing poor people. Who buys our sh*t? 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 want to eat a piece of chicken that came from a 3D printer.”

Not surprisingly, the comments have made national news in the last week, prompting Campbell’s to put Bally on leave. (Garza lost his job in January, though the reasons are unclear. Michigan law requires two-party consent for recording, and Garza had taped in secret.)

Campbell’s did not immediately respond to ADWEEK’s request for comment, but it did issue a statement when the story broke that it is “actively investigating the matter,” and that “if accurate, the comments in the recording as unacceptable.”

Assuming Bally’s vituperative blue streak happened as claimed, it’s colorful stuff coming from a C-suite executive—but that’s nothing new. Corporate chieftains have been putting their feet in their mouths by slamming their own customers for generations.

Let them eat cereal

Just last year, Kellogg’s CEO Gary Pilnick suggested while on CNBC that cash-strapped families struggling with grocery bills should just eat breakfast cereal for dinner instead.

“If you think about the cost of cereal for a family versus what they might otherwise do, that’s going to be much more affordable.”

Social media didn’t take kindly to that remark, as cereal prices had risen 28% since the pandemic—and especially after someone looked up an 8-K and discovered that Pilnick’s salary package was worth $5.4 million.

“Do you think he’s feeding his kids cereal for dinner?” asked one.

Slim down

In 2013, Lululemon founder and CEO Chip Wilson got into trouble after he opined that some women were too fat for the stretch pants he’d made millions selling to them.

“Quite frankly, some women’s bodies don’t actually don’t work,” Wilson told Bloomberg’s Street Smart. “It’s about the rubbing through the thighs, how much pressure is there.”

That remark was mild compared to another that Wilson made in 2004 to Canada’s National Post Business Magazine—that Japanese consumers struggled to pronounce the three Ls in Lululemon.

“It’s funny to watch them try and say it,” Wilson told the magazine. (In a subsequent interview with the New York Times, Wilson denied making the remark. Wilson resigned in 2015.)

Cool kids only

Abercrombie & Fitch’s late CEO Mike Jeffries—who stepped down in 2014 and recently faced federal charges of sex trafficking and interstate prostitution—also took a low view of many of his own customers. In a 2006 piece in Salon, the CEO shared his wish that all Abercrombie customers be young, slim and handsome.

Everyone else? Get lost.

“Candidly, we go after the cool kids,” Jeffries said. “We go after the attractive all-American kid with a great attitude and a lot of friends. A lot of people don’t belong [in Abercrombie], and they can’t belong.”

He criticized as “vanilla” other brands that were “trying to target everybody: young, old, fat, skinny.”

No refunds

But when it comes to slamming one’s own customers, few executives beat Ryanair CEO Michael O’Leary, who has insulted his own travelers on several occasions.

O’Leary has reportedly said that those who forget their boarding passes are “stupid.” He’s pillored flyers who ask for refunds: “You’re not getting a refund so **** off.” He’s ridiculed plus-sized passengers, too: “Nobody wants to sit beside a really fat **** on board.”

Meanwhile, as Bally’s future hangs in the balance at Campbell’s, Garza shared how he feels about the rhetorical liberties that corporate brass like Bally take: “He thinks he’s a C-level executive at a Fortune 500 company and he can do whatever he wants because he’s an executive.”