Greensboro, N.C. — Judging by Dayna Neumann's pantry, Campbell Soup Co. may turn the U.S. recession into rising sales, just as it did in the last two contractions.

Neumann's family in Louisville, Kentucky, is bracing "for a rough road ahead," the 32-year-old working mother said. After her 30-year-old husband, Nick, substituted $1.75 Campbell Chunky soup for restaurant lunches in September, she started buying as many as 15 cans at a time.

The recession will make 2009 "the year of condensed soup, driven by the backdrop of severe economic pressure on the consumer," said Mitchell Pinheiro, a Philadelphia-based analyst at Janney Montgomery Scott LLC.

The appeal of a cheap meal is turning the world's largest soupmaker, which says it sells to 85 percent of U.S. households, into an outperformer in hard times. The shares led the 12-company Standard & Poor's Packaged Foods Index over the past three months, and their 0.87 percent loss this year beat the S&P 500 by almost 48 percentage points.

Campbell is "acknowledged as a way to weather a recession," said Edgar Roesch, a Soleil Securities Corp. analyst in New York who rates the shares "buy."

Campbell may outdistance General Mills Inc., maker of Progresso soup, in shipments in 2009, according to Terry Bivens, a JPMorgan Chase & Co. analyst in New York.

The food producer has survived 28 recessions, two world wars and the Great Depression over its 139-year existence.

"Historically, Campbell's soup sales have done well during tough economic times as consumers look for value," said spokesman Anthony Sanzio.

Campbell's U.S. soup sales accelerated by 6 percent in the fiscal 12 months ended July 2001, a period that included part a recession running from March through November of that year, according to the National Bureau of Economic Research in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Soup sales rose 7 percent in the year ended July 1990 and 5 percent in the next 12 months, overlapping the contraction from July 1990 through March 1991.

As the economy has slowed in 2008, the company's soup sales in Wal-Mart Stores Inc. have climbed 12 percent to 14 percent since late August, according to Alton Stump, an analyst at Longbow Research in Independence, Ohio, who polled managers at 50 locations. He has a "neutral" rating on Campbell.

"There will not be a recession in eating," said Harry Balzer, who has studied U.S. eating habits for more than 30 years for NPD Group, a market research firm based in Port Washington, N.Y. "There will only be winners and losers."

Rising home foreclosures and unemployment that pushed consumer confidence to its lowest level in October triggered "a shift to value," Balzer said.

Fifty-seven percent of households are serving leftovers for dinner, according to Balzer, versus an historic mean of 55 percent. U.S. workers took an average of 42 homemade meals to work in the 12 months through February, the most since 1995, he said.

The current recession will give an advantage to suppliers who help consumers "moderate food costs without cooking more," Balzer said.