After 43 years, Campbell Soup Co. has ended its Soup Labels for Education program, which provided funding for school extracurricular activities.
Since 1973, the program contributed more than $110 million in supplies to tens of thousands of schools across the U.S. Schools received a point for every label cut from participating Campbell’s products.
Most of the programs were run by tangential school groups, such as parent-teacher associations, which handed the labels over to the schools. Schools then picked items from the Labels for Education catalog, which included everything from art supplies and gym equipment to iPads and minivans (minivan cost: 1.6 million points).
"During the past year, we’ve been assessing the impact of these programs and through this, we’ve seen that participation in Labels for Education has declined considerably," Campbell wrote on the Labels for Education website. "Sadly, it is at the point where we have no choice but to make the very difficult decision to wind down the program."
The deadline for sending in the UPCs was Jan. 2, and schools have until May 31 to redeem their points.
General Mills still runs Boxtops for Education, a similar program in which shoppers cut out labels from many General Mills products and turned them in to their schools, which receive cash for them. Since the program started in 1996, General Mills has given more than $868 million to schools.
