Somewhere in a recipe box in your kitchen, there is an index card in your mom’s handwriting that calls for one can of a soup you can’t buy anymore. Shoppers started noticing the hole on the shelf in 2025. No farewell, no final run, no sign taped to the shelf tag. Just a gap where the can used to be, and then a slow trickle of people online asking if anyone else had seen it lately.
The can is Campbell’s condensed Cream of Shrimp, and it is officially done, discontinued in 2025. “We discontinued Campbell’s Cream of Shrimp last year,” a Campbell’s spokesperson told Chowhound in an email in October 2026. “We found that consumers prefer our other ‘Cream Of’ products, which are excellent soups for our variety of easy recipes. Consumers can continue to find a variety of soups across our portfolio.”
It is also no longer listed on Campbell’s website, which is usually the last word on these things. The soup sat on store shelves right up until late 2025 before it quietly stopped showing up.
The soup almost nobody bought, except the people who really bought it
Cream of Shrimp was never a star. It lived on the same shelf as Cream of Mushroom and Cream of Chicken and got walked past by roughly everyone. Plenty of shoppers who have been buying Campbell’s their entire adult lives have never once put it in a cart.
That is exactly why the reaction caught people off guard. The folks who bought it bought it on repeat, year after year, because it was the base of a dish nobody in the family would let them skip. Shrimp dip. Shrimp casserole. Shrimp bisque. Seafood chowder. Shrimp étouffée. In certain parts of the country it was less a soup than an ingredient, the canned shortcut that made a regional dish taste like it was supposed to.
The complaints that followed all have the same shape, which is what makes them worth paying attention to. One cook had used it in the family shrimp dip for 50 years, in a recipe handed down from a mother. Another had a late grandmother’s shrimp casserole that is now unrepeatable in its original form. Those are not reviews of a soup. They are people realizing a holiday tradition just lost a part you can’t order online.
Two dollar cans are now selling in $200 lots
Resellers found this story before most home cooks did. Campbell’s cans normally run between $1.50 and $2.50 at most stores. On eBay, the discontinued shrimp flavor has turned into a flipping target alongside sneakers and trading cards.
Two-packs are the sweet spot for sellers, listed anywhere from $25 to $35. Single cans go for $12 to $18. A 12-pack that would have cost around $20 to $30 at a grocery store was listed at $150 in October 2026, and some sellers were asking upwards of $200.
Cans have shown up on Amazon too, at prices in the same neighborhood. Before you hit buy, check the best by date in the listing photos. A lot of the remaining stock has best by dates coming up soon, and $200 for a case you need to use up quickly is a rough trade.
There is also stock still sitting in regular stores. Smaller independent grocers and out-of-the-way supermarkets tend to be the last places a dying item hangs on. If you want the real thing at the real price, that is where it will be, not in a bidding war.
A Red Lobster favorite reportedly leaned on this exact can
Reddit users who copied Red Lobster’s Ultimate Fondue at home say it used Cream of Shrimp as the base, doing the work on both flavor and that thick, dippable texture. The fondue itself left the Red Lobster menu before the soup left shelves, so the people chasing it at home were already working from memory.
Everyday uses got stranger and better than the holiday stuff. Cooks poured it over rice with extra shrimp for an easy weeknight dinner. One trick making the rounds: a whole head of cauliflower, the can of soup, and garlic, pepper and onion seasoning, turned into a quick dinner. That is the kind of utility that does not show up in sales data until the product is gone.
The clam chowder vanished right before it
Cream of Shrimp was not the only casualty. Campbell’s condensed New England clam chowder was pulled in 2025 as well, and shoppers spent months puzzled by the empty spot before Campbell’s confirmed it. Finding it turned into a scavenger hunt, store by store.
Campbell’s reasoning was different for the chowder. “We found that consumers preferred this variety in a ready-to-serve format,” a Campbell’s spokesperson told Mashed. The brand still sells Chunky New England and Manhattan clam chowders, a Chunky Old Bay seasoned clam chowder, and a ready-to-serve New England chowder in the Homestyle line.
Condensed loyalists are not satisfied, and they have a fair point. The whole appeal of a condensed can is that you control the dilution, so you can make chowder as thick and creamy as you want it. Hand someone a pre-mixed can and you have taken away the only lever they cared about. The common complaint about the Chunky version is that it lacks flavor next to the original, and purists also object to the celery in it.
What to use instead when the recipe says one can
Blue Runner, a canned food company out of Louisiana, makes a cream of shrimp soup that is still on shelves in some regions. That is the closest thing to a straight swap, assuming your store carries it. Southern and Gulf Coast grocery stores are your best bet.
If you can’t find it, Campbell’s Cream of Onion is the starting point most cooks have settled on, because the ingredient lists of the two soups are strikingly similar. The simplest version adds shrimp and a little tomato puree to a can of Cream of Onion and calls it close enough.
The more ambitious copycat method making the rounds goes like this: two cans of Cream of Onion, two cans of half and half, brought up to a simmer. Add 12 ounces of deveined, tailless shrimp and cook 30 more minutes. Chill it overnight so the flavors settle, then run it through a food processor the next day, reheat, and serve. It takes two days of clock time but almost no actual work, and it skips the part where you build a stock from shrimp shells.
Shrimp bouillon stirred into another “cream of” soup is the lazy option, and it gets you most of the way there for a dip where the shrimp flavor is background rather than the point. Making it from scratch is the best-tasting route and by far the most work, since the flavor lives in the shells.
Chowder people have it easier. Bar Harbor Foods and Snow’s both sell canned condensed New England clam chowder, so the format you lost still exists under another label. Campbell’s own condensed cream of potato is also a near match for the discontinued chowder, minus the clams and with a few ingredient differences. Dump in a can of chopped clams and you are basically back where you started.
Campbell’s does not really do comebacks
Petitions and comment sections rarely move this company. Retro green pea soup was killed off in 2019. Chunky Chicken Mushroom Chowder went in 2023. Go back further and you find mock turtle soup, made with calf heads to imitate turtle meat, which was a hit in the early 1900s, and a mid-century hot dog bean soup that has been forgotten by almost everyone. Once a flavor is permanently cut, it almost never returns in its original form.
The bigger shift behind all of this is that condensed soup has been losing ground for years. By the late 2010s the slide was serious enough to raise questions about Campbell’s financial future, and the company has leaned hard into ready-to-eat since. Condensed soup is a cooking ingredient pretending to be a meal. The Chunky and Homestyle lines are the meal, and that is where the growth is.
Campbell’s has been selling soup since 1895 and invented the condensed can in 1897. Andy Warhol first showed his paintings of those cans in 1962. None of that history buys a slow-selling flavor a spot on the shelf.
My honest advice if this can is in your recipe box
Do not pay reseller prices for a case. You are buying a short-dated pantry item at five to ten times the shelf price to postpone the problem by one holiday season, and next holiday season you are right back here with no cans and no plan.
Spend the effort figuring out the substitute instead. Make Grandma’s shrimp dip once before the holidays with the Cream of Onion workaround, taste it against your memory, and adjust the seasoning until it lands. Write the new version on the back of the old index card. The recipe survives either way, and the people eating it at the party are not going to know which can it came from.
If Blue Runner shows up at your store, grab a few. That is the one swap that requires zero technique, and it is sitting there at normal grocery store money while everyone else fights over eBay listings.
