27th Annual Excellence Awards: Call for Nominations

The deadline for nominations for the 2010 Excellence Awards Honoring the Region’s Small Businesses has been extended. Each year, the Chamber recognizes businesses with fewer than 100 employees for their outstanding performance, civic involvement, corporate responsibility and customer service.

Excellence Award winners fall into ten categories and are chosen by a panel of their peers.

Nominees must:

• Be located in the Chamber’s 11-county Greater Philadelphia footprint
• Have between one and 100 employees
• Have been in business at least three years
• Not have won an Excellence Award in the last five years

Nominations are now due June 5, 2009.

For more information on all award criteria and entry categories, click here. To submit a nomination, click here.

Past Winner: Promoting Excellence in (a formerly) Small Business:
Campbell Soup Company, Winner of the Visionary Award

The winner of the Visionary Award for the Chamber’s 2009 Excellence Awards Honoring the Region’s Small Businesses is featured in this issue: Campbell Soup Company.

Introduced as part of the Excellence Awards program in 2008, the Visionary Award was created to honor a large national or international corporation that began as a small company in the Greater Philadelphia region and continues to contribute to the growth and success of our business community.

Visionary Award recipient
Campbell Soup

Campbell Soup Company is an $8 billion global manufacturer and marketer of high-quality foods. The company is focused on large and growing markets: simple meals, heavily anchored by Campbell’s soup; baked snacks, anchored by Pepperidge Farm in North America and Arnott’s in Asia-Pacific; and healthy beverages, anchored by the V8 brand.

More than 3,000 of Campbell’s 19,000 employees are based in the tristate region. Since 2001, Campbell has been led by Douglas R. Conant, President and Chief Executive Officer, who joined the company with 25 years of extensive food industry experience. He is the 11th leader in Campbell’s nearly 140-year history.

Under Conant’s leadership, Campbell has reversed a decline in market value and employee engagement by making significant investments to improve product quality and packaging, by strengthening its marketing programs and by developing a robust innovation pipeline. Campbell also has improved its financial profile, enhanced its relationships with customers and continuously improved its employee engagement.

As a result, Campbell is well on its way to achieving its mission of building the world’s most extraordinary food company by nourishing people’s lives everywhere, every day. Campbell continues to be a model of corporate social responsibility, most notably with its efforts to help revitalize its hometown, Camden, New Jersey. In mid-October, the company broke ground on a $90 million expansion of its world headquarters. Campbell also plans to help develop an office park adjacent to its campus to attract new businesses to the city.

Long active in the community, Campbell recently outlined plans to contribute $10 million to Camden’s neighborhood revitalization efforts, job training initiatives and projects designed to benefit youth, such as after-school and summer programs. The $10 million Public Benefits Plan will be funded over the next five years by Campbell and the Campbell Soup Foundation, the company’s philanthropic arm.

For more information on the Excellence Awards, click here.