In November 2024, Robert Garza, a recently hired security analyst for Campbell Soup Company, says he met vice president and chief information security officer Martin Bally at a restaurant near the firm’s Camden, New Jersey headquarters for what he thought would be a routine salary discussion, only to secretly record an hour-plus tirade in which Bally called Campbell’s canned soups “shit for fucking poor people,” described them as highly processed and unhealthy, boasted about coming to work high on marijuana edibles, and launched into a racist rant about Indian colleagues he labeled “idiots.”
Garza, who had started working remotely in September 2024, kept the recording for several weeks, then reported Bally’s behavior to his supervisor around January 10, 2025; about 20 days later, on January 30, he was fired, and his November 20, 2025 lawsuit in Wayne County Circuit Court claims he was terminated in retaliation for raising misconduct and that Campbell’s tolerated a racially hostile work environment.
When the year-old audio was released publicly alongside the lawsuit just days before Thanksgiving 2025—crucial season for a 150-year-old company whose soups are staples in holiday casseroles—it spread nationwide as listeners heard Bally not only mock the working-class families who buy Campbell’s but also warn that its chicken was “bioengineered meat” he likened to something from a 3D printer, even though no evidence has surfaced that the company actually uses lab-grown or 3D-printed chicken.
Campbell’s first put Bally on leave while investigating, then announced that after reviewing the audio it believed the voice was his and, calling the comments “vulgar, offensive and false,” confirmed that as of November 25 he was no longer employed. At the same time, the company stressed that its soups use “100% real” No-Antibiotics-Ever chicken sourced from long-trusted, USDA-approved suppliers and explicitly denied using 3D-printed chicken, lab-grown meat, or any kind of bioengineered chicken, saying any “bioengineered” labeling refers to conventional genetically modified crop ingredients allowed under federal disclosure rules, not to cell-cultivated meat.
Because Florida had already passed a first-in-the-nation 2024 law banning the manufacture and sale of cultivated (“lab-grown”) meat as part of a broader pushback against global-elite food agendas, the leaked tape prompted Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier to announce a consumer-protection probe of Campbell’s and publicly warn that he would “shut down” any company violating that law, turning this corporate HR scandal into a flashpoint in the fight over what kind of engineered proteins Americans are really being served.
For many critics already distrustful of Big Food and biotech experiments with the food supply, Bally’s own contemptuous words about “poor people” and “bioengineered meat” sound less like a one-off drunken rant and more like a rare glimpse of how some industry insiders privately view the cheap, heavily processed products they sell to budget-strapped families, and they want this case to be the start of much tougher scrutiny of what’s actually in America’s cans.
