Fruit and Vegetable Canning, Pickling, and Drying (United States) — NAICS 31142

An investor's primer. NAICS = North American Industry Classification System, the U.S. government's standard code for an industry. This is a rollup: it synthesizes the three child industries beneath this code and adds the federal figures for the group as a whole. Figures are reported facts with citations; statements about the future are labeled as judgments.

1. Overview

This is the corner of American food manufacturing that makes fresh produce last — by sealing it in a can or jar, pickling it, cooking it into a shelf-stable meal, or drying the water out of it. Under one federal code it gathers three quite different businesses: plain canned fruits and vegetables (tomatoes, corn, peaches, pickles), canned prepared meals (soup, baby food, SpaghettiOs, baked beans), and dried and freeze-dried foods (raisins, dehydrated potato and onion, camping meals, freeze-dried snacks). The federal government counts about 1,188 plants employing roughly 73,900 people, shipping about $45.9 billion of product in 2022.[1][2]

Why an investor should care: taken together this is a defensive, mature, low-growth staple — people keep buying shelf-stable food in recessions, and often buy more when budgets tighten — but it is also a commodity-processing business squeezed between farm-crop volatility on one side and packaging cost (the steel can) on the other. Margins are thin, and 2025 delivered a landmark stress event: 139-year-old Del Monte Foods filed for Chapter 11 (court-supervised reorganization) and was broken up and sold to three buyers in early 2026.[3]

The single most useful thing to understand up front is that the three children are not the same business, and the differences are exactly where investment decisions get made. One is big and fragmented; one is small and concentrated in a handful of household names; one is mid-sized and quietly the most interesting for growth. There is no clean way to "buy the group": the near-pure public plays are small and thinly traded, the famous brands sit inside diversified giants, and some of the biggest packers are private companies and grower cooperatives ordinary investors cannot buy at all. Both public and private routes matter — this primer covers each.

2. What's inside — the three children and how they differ

The code splits into three industries. The distinctive value of looking at them together is the contrast: they differ sharply in size, growth direction, how concentrated they are, and who owns them.

CR4 = share of shipments made by the four largest firms; HHI = Herfindahl-Hirschman Index, the standard concentration gauge, where under ~1,500 is considered unconcentrated.[2] "Suppressed" means the Census withheld the figure to protect confidential data — we do not state or estimate a suppressed value.

How to read the contrast:

• Size and jobs. Fruit & vegetable canning is the elephant — roughly 60% of shipments, 61% of the jobs, and two-thirds of the plants. The other two are minority partners of similar size. Employment splits 44,903 / 11,084 / 17,886 across the three, which sums exactly to the group's 73,873.[1][4][5][6]

• Capital intensity runs the opposite way from size. Measured by shipments per worker, specialty canning is the most automated (~$888,000 per employee — a few large, high-throughput plants), fruit & vegetable canning is middling (~$610,000), and dried/dehydrated is the most labor-relative (~$483,000).[4][5][6] Pay tracks this: specialty canning pays best (~$74k average), dried lowest (~$54k).

• Concentration is the sharpest difference. These three sit at opposite ends of the spectrum. Specialty canning is a tight oligopoly where the top four firms make more than two-thirds of everything (soup and baby food are household-name businesses). Fruit & vegetable canning is genuinely fragmented at the factory level — its top four make under a fifth — because canning is spread across many regional plants, cooperatives, and private-label packers even though a few brands dominate the shelf. Dried food sits in between.

• Ownership mix is why "investing in the group" is hard. All three lean heavily on owners the public market can't reach — grower cooperatives (you join by farming, you don't buy shares), private family firms, and private-equity-held brands. The one child with a recognizable near-pure public stock is fruit & vegetable canning (Seneca Foods); specialty canning is reachable only through diversified staples giants; dried food is almost entirely private.

• Direction of travel diverges. All three are mature, but dried/dehydrated is the only one with real growth pockets — freeze-dried snacks, pet food, clean-label ingredients, and exports — whereas the two canning segments are defending flat-to-declining volumes with price increases and premium lines.[5][6]

3. How big it is (the rollup)

Ground-truth federal figures for the group, NAICS 31142:

That works out to roughly 62 employees per plant, average pay near $63,600, and average shipments of about $44 million per firm — a picture of medium-to-large industrial plants, not tiny operators.[1][2]

The group looks unconcentrated — because its biggest piece is. The group HHI of 269.2 and CR4 of 23.1% both say "fragmented," but that is an artifact of composition: the largest child (fruit & vegetable canning) is genuinely fragmented and drags the average down, masking the tight oligopoly inside specialty canning (soup, baby food). Read the children, not just the rollup, before drawing any conclusion about competition.

Two honesty notes on the numbers:

1. These are factory-gate values, not retail spending. $45.9 billion is what plants ship, before distributor and grocer markups, and it excludes imported cans and dried goods. Market-research "market size" figures you may see elsewhere are far larger because they bundle imports, retail markups, and broader global product definitions; this primer anchors on the federal like-for-like measure.[4][6]

2. The count is good for canning, but undercounts dried food. The two canning children are capital-intensive factory industries that the Census captures well. The dried/dehydrated child is understated for two reasons: captive production (a cereal, soup, or pet-food company drying its own fruit or vegetables is classified to its primary product, not to this code), and the freeze-dried candy micro-sector — since the 2023–24 social-media boom, thousands of home-based and e-commerce operators run countertop freeze-dryers below Census thresholds.[6] So the true economic footprint of drying is somewhat larger than the federal line shows. (A smaller technical note: the three children's firm counts sum to about 1,055, slightly above the group's 1,040, because some firms operate in more than one child and are counted once at the group level.)

4. The investable universe (where value concentrates across the children)

There is no pure public "canning-and-drying" stock and no fund dedicated to this group. Where you can put money differs by child, and the table below keeps the same order as Section 2. Revenue figures are company-wide — only a slice sits in this code — and tickers are reserved for this section and Section 10.

Public companies:

Major private and cooperative owners (not investable on a public exchange):

• The Morning Star Company (311421) — the world's largest tomato processor, handling roughly 40% of California's processing-tomato crop; privately held.[19]
• Pacific Coast Producers (311421) — a grower-owned cooperative with approximately 160 grower owners, packing canned tomatoes and fruit for foodservice and private label; acquired Del Monte and S&W shelf-stable fruit inventory and licensing rights for the U.S., Mexico, and Puerto Rico in March 2026.[3][20]
• Lakeside Foods (311421) — family-owned processor with 15 locations, heavy private-label exposure.[21]
• Red Gold (311421) — describes itself as the largest privately held U.S. tomato-products manufacturer.[22]
• Bush Brothers & Company / Bush's Beans (311422) — family-owned, ~$1 billion revenue, roughly 80% of America's canned baked beans and more than one-third of the broader U.S. canned-bean market.[23]
• Amy's Kitchen (311422) — family-owned organic canned soups and chili.[24]
• Hometown Food Company (311422) — PE-backed (Brynwood Partners); acquired Chef Boyardee for $600 million in June 2025 including the dedicated Milton, Pennsylvania facility.[14][15]
• Sun-Maid and Sunsweet Growers (311423) — grower cooperatives; the world's largest raisin and dried-plum operations respectively.[25][26]
• Basic American Foods, Idahoan, OFD Foods (Mountain House ~70% of camping freeze-dried meals) (311423) — private manufacturers dominating dehydrated potato and freeze-dried meals.[6][27][28]
• Thrive Freeze Dry (311423) — Mubadala-backed contract manufacturer spanning bulk ingredients, complete meals, and consumer products.[29]

Recent ownership changes. TreeHouse Foods, formerly the largest listed private-label maker of soups/broths, was acquired by PE firm Investindustrial in February 2026 at $2.9 billion of enterprise value and is now private.[30] Sow Good (SOWG), a former freeze-dried-candy pure play, sold substantially all its manufacturing assets for $1.5 million in December 2025 after a sharp revenue collapse and is no longer a manufacturer.[31]

Takeaway: value concentrates in places the public market barely touches. Where you can buy in, the exposure is diluted — the big brands live inside staples conglomerates, and the near-pure plays (Seneca in canning) are small, cyclical, and volatile.

5. How the money works

Across all three children the economics are those of a seasonal-to-steady, capital-intensive, thin-margin commodity processor — closer to a metals mill than to a branded-snack maker. The levers that decide whether an owner makes money:

• Buy cheap raw crop, sell a preserved product for more than crop-plus-processing. Canners cook and seal; driers remove water (fresh produce is ~80–90% water, so drying concentrates a bulky, perishable crop into a light, shelf-stable one). Either way the raw crop is the biggest variable cost, bought on contracted acreage from growers.

• The can itself is a major line item. For the two canning children, the steel (tinplate) can can run to roughly a third of the cost of a finished can of food — which is why steel-tariff policy (Sections 7 and 9) moves the whole group's economics. For dried food, energy plays the equivalent role: dehydration, and especially freeze-drying (a multi-hour vacuum process), is energy-hungry.

• Capacity utilization is the core profit lever. Crops harvest in a short window, so canneries run flat-out during the "pack," build a year of inventory at once, then sell it down — tying up large working capital. Dried-food plants and automated soup lines earn their return only when kept full; underused lines crush margins, which is why owners constantly prune slow brands and consolidate production.

• Margins are thin and swing hard. Seneca — the clearest public window into pure canning — earned a gross margin of about 9.5% in fiscal 2025, recovering to 13.9% in fiscal 2026 as pack costs normalized; a few points of margin is the whole game.[7][8] Campbell's Meals & Beverages segment (which includes soup plus beverages, sauces, and foodservice) reported fiscal 2025 segment operating earnings of $1.08 billion on $6.05 billion of sales — an implied 17.8% segment operating margin — though that is a segment margin, not an industry figure.[12] Dried-food owners split between thin-margin commodity ingredient supply and higher-margin branded lines (Sun-Maid, Mountain House).[6]

• Branded vs. private label. Branded product earns more but keeps losing shelf share to cheaper store brands when shoppers trade down; co-packing and private-label work brings volume at razor-thin margins. Mix drives profitability in every child.

• The balance sheet is the silent killer. Thin, cyclical margins make leverage lethal. Seneca cut net debt ~$297 million and survived a bad crop year; Del Monte, loaded with ~$1.2 billion of debt after a buyout, saw its interest bill nearly double and filed for bankruptcy.[7][32][33] Owners who win keep debt low enough to survive a bad harvest.

• Cooperatives distribute differently. In grower-owned co-ops (Pacific Coast Producers, Sun-Maid, Sunsweet), "profit" flows back to member-farmers as crop payments rather than to outside shareholders — so there is no equity to buy; you participate by farming.[25][26]

6. What drives demand

• Value-seeking and food security (the defensive core). Canned and dried produce are cheap, storable, and non-perishable, so demand holds up — and can rise — when household budgets tighten or shoppers stock pantries. Canned soup is famously counter-cyclical.[34]
• Convenience and center-store staples. Ready-to-eat, no-refrigeration, multi-year shelf life suits time-pressed and single-person households. Tomatoes (sauce, paste, diced) are the demand backbone of the canning side because they are an everyday cooking ingredient, not a discretionary treat.[11]
• Government and institutional buying. USDA (U.S. Department of Agriculture) buys canned and dried foods for school-meal and food-bank programs; canned produce is eligible under SNAP (Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program) and WIC (the nutrition program for Women, Infants, and Children); disaster preparedness, the military, and humanitarian relief create durable baseline demand.
• Growth pockets (mostly in dried food). Freeze-dried snacks, freeze-dried raw pet food, camping/backpacking meals, and clean-label dehydrated ingredients are the fastest-growing end uses; USDA has reported double-digit export growth for dehydrated onion, garlic, and potato.[6]
• The secular headwind. Working against all of this, health-conscious and younger shoppers are drifting toward fresh, frozen, and "clean-label" foods; canned units have fallen two years running on "processed food" perceptions, and USDA estimates total U.S. vegetable and pulse availability fell to 376 pounds per person in 2024 — its lowest level in more than 35 years.[35][36] Manufacturers counter with low-sodium, organic, and premium lines. Demand is durable, not growing — with dried snacking the main exception.

7. Regulation

Regulation here is mostly about food safety and labeling, not price or entry — but it raises fixed compliance costs, modestly favoring larger operators.

• FDA low-acid canned food (LACF) rules — the defining regime for both canning children. Because improperly canned low-acid food can grow the bacterium behind botulism, the FDA (Food and Drug Administration) regulates it tightly: under 21 CFR (Code of Federal Regulations) Parts 108, 113, and 114, processors of low-acid and acidified foods must register each plant with the FDA and file a validated "scheduled process" for every product, container, and method, with trained operators. This is a hard scientific barrier to entry and a catastrophic-if-breached safety regime.[37]
• FSMA for all three children. Facilities are generally subject to the FDA's Food Safety Modernization Act (FSMA) Preventive Controls rule, requiring hazard analysis, preventive controls, monitoring, and verification.[38] For dried foods the critical control point is water activity — dried foods sit below the level where Salmonella grows but where it can survive, so low-moisture recalls are a live risk. Sulfite labeling (for color-preserved dried fruit) applies above 10 parts per million.[6]
• USDA FSIS (Food Safety and Inspection Service) adds a second inspector wherever products contain meaningful meat (canned chili, beef stew, some meal mixes).
• Baby-food heavy metals — the live front in specialty canning. FDA's January 2025 guidance sets lead action levels of 10 parts per billion for most covered fruits, vegetables, mixtures, yogurts, puddings, and meats, and 20 ppb for single-ingredient root vegetables and dry infant cereals; California's AB 899 now requires baby-food makers to test for and disclose heavy-metal levels — a compliance and litigation pressure point.[39][40]
• Environmental obligations. Canning and dehydration facilities face EPA effluent guidelines regulating biochemical oxygen demand, suspended solids, and other wastewater parameters; Campbell's disclosed planned fiscal 2026 spending of approximately $55 million on wastewater infrastructure across its network, illustrating that environmental capital can be material even for large operators.[12][41]
• Sodium, packaging chemistry, and standards. Voluntary FDA sodium-reduction targets, the move to BPA-free (bisphenol A) can liners, restrictions on PFAS ("forever chemicals"), and product grading/standards of identity all raise reformulation and disclosure costs.
• Trade policy (increasingly central). Section 232 steel tariffs (raised to 50% in 2025) and thin domestic tinplate supply hit the canning side directly; antidumping duties on imported dried garlic and vegetables are a live variable for dried-food producers.[42][6]

8. Consolidation

The whole group is unconcentrated (HHI 269.2; top four firms 23.1% of shipments), but that average hides three different competitive worlds: a fragmented canning business, a tight soup/baby-food oligopoly, and a middling dried-food business.[2] Consolidation is the theme across all three, and it accelerated in 2025–26:

• Del Monte's bankruptcy breakup (2025–26) split a national brand across three buyers — Del Monte Corporation (formerly Fresh Del Monte Produce; the Del Monte brand plus canned vegetable, tomato, and refrigerated-fruit assets, ~$285 million), B&G Foods (the College Inn/Kitchen Basics broth business, ~$110 million), and Pacific Coast Producers (Del Monte and S&W shelf-stable fruit) — roughly $509 million in total.[3][9][10][20] Earlier, B&G sold its Green Giant U.S. canned line to Seneca, concentrating canned-vegetable capacity in the pure play.[43]
• Portfolio pruning and PE carve-outs (specialty canning). Big owners keep the growth brands and sell the tired ones: Conagra completed its sale of Chef Boyardee to PE-backed Hometown Food for $600 million in June 2025, including the dedicated Milton, Pennsylvania facility; General Mills has weighed a Progresso sale; TreeHouse Foods, the biggest listed private-label player, was acquired by Investindustrial in February 2026 at $2.9 billion of enterprise value.[14][15][30] Campbell's bought premium Rao's/Sovos for ~$2.7 billion.[11] Family holdouts (Bush's, Amy's) stay independent and dominant in their niches.[23][24]
• Two-directional consolidation in dried food. Capital intensity draws PE and strategic buyers into ingredient dehydration — Mubadala-backed Thrive Freeze Dry; Japan's Nichirei owning Chaucer Foods; Arbor Investments acquiring Oregon Freeze Dry (Mountain House) in 2021.[27][29][44] Large confectioners have entered freeze-dried candy (Mars launched Skittles Pop'd and M&M's Pop'd).[45] But the low-barrier freeze-dried-candy consumer end saw a flood of micro-entrants and a shakeout rather than a roll-up — Sow Good sold substantially all its manufacturing assets for $1.5 million in December 2025.[31]

Competition across the group is on cost, scale, grower relationships, and private-label contracts far more than on brand marketing. That favors low-cost, low-debt operators (cooperatives, efficient private processors) and punishes anyone carrying too much debt — Del Monte being the object lesson.

9. Risks

• Tinplate-steel tariffs — the defining near-term risk for the canning side. The U.S. imports roughly 80% of the tinplate used for food cans, and Section 232 tariffs were raised to 50% in June 2025. Analysts estimate can costs could rise ~9–15%, and consumer prices for canned fruits and vegetables rose about 5% in the year to September 2025 — nearly double food inflation generally.[42] This directly compressed Del Monte and is a live margin threat industry-wide.
• Crop, weather, and water volatility. A poor season cuts volume and raises per-unit costs at once; California — the raw-material heartland for tomatoes, raisins, prunes, garlic, and onions — faces recurring drought and water-allocation risk.[7]
• Energy costs (dried food especially). Dehydration and freeze-drying are energy-intensive; energy spikes compress those margins directly.[6]
• Secular demand softness as shoppers favor fresh, frozen, and clean-label products; canned units have fallen two years running, and USDA documents a 35-year low in vegetable and pulse availability.[35][36]
• Private-label margin pressure — store brands keep taking share from branded cans and packages.
• Leverage — thin, cyclical margins make debt lethal, as Del Monte demonstrated.[32][33]
• Litigation and safety — baby-food heavy-metal lawsuits are an open liability, and any LACF processing failure (botulism) or low-moisture Salmonella recall can be brand-ending. A 2025 recall of Döhler Dry Ingredient Solutions freeze-dried fruit for potential Listeria illustrates that shelf stability is not equivalent to pathogen safety.[39][46]
• Fad/overcapacity risk — the freeze-dried-candy collapse (Sow Good sold substantially all its manufacturing assets for $1.5 million in December 2025 after revenue deteriorated sharply) shows how a low-barrier consumer segment can overbuild and crater.[31]

10. How to invest and the outlook

Public routes (mostly diluted and indirect):

• The one near-pure canning stock is Seneca Foods (SENEA / SENEB) — a small-cap, family-controlled processor with no dividend, thin single-digit margins, and earnings that swing with the crop: a deep-value commodity-processor profile, not a growth staple. Fiscal 2026 sales rose to $1.66 billion and gross margin recovered to 13.9%.[7][8]
• Del Monte Corporation (DMC) — formerly Fresh Del Monte Produce — offers newly enlarged exposure to Del Monte and Contadina packaged vegetables and tomatoes following its March 2026 acquisition, but retains substantial fresh-produce and international operations.[9][10]
• Specialty canning is reachable only through diversified staples names — Campbell's (CPB), General Mills (GIS), Conagra (CAG), Hormel (HRL) — bought for stability and dividends, since canned meals are a small slice of each. Note that Conagra is no longer a direct Chef Boyardee owner after the June 2025 sale.[11][15]
• Dried food offers the thinnest public access — Sensient (SXT) and Lamb Weston (LW) for diluted dehydrated-ingredient exposure, BranchOut Food (BOF) as a speculative micro-cap with Peru-based production and a going-concern qualification, plus foreign-listed Olam/ofi and Nichirei.[16][17][18] Sow Good (SOWG) is no longer a manufacturer.[31]
• There is no group-specific ETF (exchange-traded fund); broad consumer-staples or packaged-food funds give only faint, blended exposure.

Private routes (where the real ownership sits):

• Grower cooperatives (Pacific Coast Producers, Sun-Maid, Sunsweet) — joined by farming member acreage, not bought as shares.
• Private and family processors (Morning Star, Bush's, Amy's, Lakeside Foods, Red Gold, dehydrated-potato firms) — occasionally change hands via private M&A (mergers and acquisitions), but the largest are closely held.
• PE-style carve-outs of orphaned brands (Chef Boyardee is the template) and build-ups of ingredient dehydrators — a buy-cheap-cash-flow, fix-and-optimize game. Arbor's 2021 acquisition of Oregon Freeze Dry and Investindustrial's 2026 TreeHouse take-private are representative transactions.[27][30]
• Adjacent plays — farmland tied to processing acreage, co-packing/private-label businesses, and the can and drying-equipment suppliers whose fortunes track the same cycle.

Outlook (forward-looking judgment, not reported fact). The base case is a mature, low-growth group with downside protection and limited upside — defensive staples exposure and cheap, cyclical processing assets rather than growth. Within it, the growth is lopsided: canned fruit and legacy meals keep eroding on volume while tomatoes and value-priced staples prove resilient, and the healthier growth sits in dried food's freeze-dried snacks, pet food, clean-label ingredients, and exports. The single biggest swing factor over the next year or two is tariff-driven tinplate inflation on the canning side: if 50% steel tariffs persist, can costs and margins stay pressured; any rollback is a direct tailwind. Consolidation should continue as the Del Monte estate is absorbed, strategics prune tired brands, and PE buys the cash-generative tail. The winners will be low-cost, low-debt operators with strong grower relationships and private-label scale — plus, on the dried side, the branded owners who ride the clean-label and pet trends.

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Sources

1. U.S. Census Bureau, County Business Patterns (CBP), 2023 (NAICS 31142 and children: establishments, employment, annual payroll). https://www.census.gov/programs-surveys/cbp.html
2. U.S. Census Bureau, 2022 Economic Census — Concentration and Comparative Statistics (NAICS 31142: receipts, firm count, CR4/CR8/CR20/CR50, HHI). https://www.census.gov/programs-surveys/economic-census.html
3. Food Processing, "Bankrupt Del Monte Foods Divvied Up, Sold to Three Separate Companies," 2026. https://www.foodprocessing.com/business-of-food-beverage/mergers-acquisitions/news/55343818/
4. Histometrics primer, Fruit and Vegetable Canning (NAICS 311421) — federal statistics (2022 EC receipts ~$27.4B; 2023 CBP 802 establishments, 44,903 employees; CR4 19.8%, HHI ~206) and company sources therein.
5. Histometrics primer, Specialty Canning (NAICS 311422) — federal statistics (2022 EC receipts $9.84B, CR4 68.7%, HHI suppressed; 2023 CBP 110 establishments, 11,084 employees) and company sources therein.
6. Histometrics primer, Dried and Dehydrated Food Manufacturing (NAICS 311423) — federal statistics (2022 EC receipts ~$8.64B, CR4 33.3%, HHI 478.2; 2023 CBP 276 establishments, 17,886 employees) and company/market sources therein.
7. Seneca Foods Corporation, Form 10-K, Fiscal Year 2025, U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/88948/000143774925020197/senea20250331_10k.htm
8. Seneca Foods Corporation, Form 10-K, Fiscal Year 2026, U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/88948/000143774926020290/senea20260331d_10k.htm
9. Del Monte Corporation, Form 8-K (acquisition closing), U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, March 2026. https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1047340/000119312526124060/d101697d8k.htm
10. Del Monte Corporation, "Rings in New Era with NYSE Opening Bell and Transition to Ticker Symbol DMC," 2026. https://investorrelations.freshdelmonte.com/news/news-details/2026/Del-Monte-Corporation-Rings-in-New-Era-with-NYSE-Opening-Bell-and-Transition-to-Ticker-Symbol-DMC/default.aspx
11. The Campbell's Company, "Campbell's Reports Fourth Quarter Fiscal 2025 Results," 2025. https://www.thecampbellscompany.com/newsroom/press-releases/
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15. Conagra Brands, "Conagra Brands Completes Divestiture of Chef Boyardee Brand to Hometown Food Company," June 2025. https://www.conagrabrands.com/news-room/news-conagra-brands-completes-divestiture-of-chef-boyardeer-brand-to-hometown-food-company-a-brynwood-partners-portfolio-company-prn-122923
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25. Sun-Maid Growers of California. https://www.sunmaid.com/about-us/grower-story/
26. Sunsweet Growers. https://www.ccof.org/directory-member/sunsweet-growers-inc-and-dba-disruptive-beverages-inc/
27. Arbor Investments, "Arbor Investments Announces Acquisition of … Oregon Freeze Dry" (2021). https://www.arborpic.com/arbor-investments-announces-acquisition-of-largest-north-american-freeze-dryer-oregon-freeze-dry/
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29. Thrive Freeze Dry. https://www.thrivefoods.com/about-us/
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31. Sow Good Inc., 2025 Form 10-K. https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1490161/000119312526133385/sowg-20251231.htm
32. CNN Business, "Del Monte Foods: 138-year-old grocery store staple files for bankruptcy," 2025. https://www.cnn.com/2025/07/02/food/del-monte-foods-bankruptcy
33. Axios, "Del Monte Foods files for bankruptcy and is pursuing a sale," 2025. https://www.axios.com/2025/07/02/del-monte-foods-bankruptcy
34. Market.us, "Canned Soup Market Size, Share," 2025. https://market.us/report/global-canned-soup-market/
35. FoodNavigator, "Cans to be canned? Consumers turn away from shelf-stable food," 2025. https://www.foodnavigator.com/Article/2025/07/25/
36. USDA Economic Research Service, "U.S. vegetable and pulse availability falls to 35-year low," 2025. https://www.ers.usda.gov/data-products/charts-of-note/112836
37. U.S. Food and Drug Administration / eCFR, 21 CFR Part 113 — Thermally Processed Low-Acid Foods Packaged in Hermetically Sealed Containers (and Parts 108, 114), 2025. https://www.ecfr.gov/current/title-21/chapter-I/subchapter-B/part-113
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