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A dish of green beans, creamy sauce and crispy onions has a long-standing seat at the Thanksgiving table, and a new survey says it carries memories too. In its State of the Sides report, released October 27, Campbell’s says 67% of surveyed adults say green bean casserole reminds them of Thanksgivings past. The survey was commissioned by Campbell’s, the company that makes the soup the casserole is famous for, so every figure below is the company’s own, produced with its research firm.
Who Paid for the Survey and How It Was Run
Campbell’s commissioned a survey of 5,017 US adults, 18 and over, who celebrate Thanksgiving. The research was conducted in August and September 2026 by Reputation Leaders, which the release describes as an independent research organization.
The margin of error is plus or minus 1.4% for the national results and plus or minus 9.8% for the state results, at 95% confidence, according to the release. Because the soup maker paid for the work and sells a product the dish depends on, the numbers read best as Campbell’s picture of the holiday, not a neutral census of it.
The trade publication Prepared Foods carried the same findings on November 2 and attributed them to Campbell’s report, which it said was now in its fifth year.
What Campbell’s Reports About the Casserole
Green bean casserole is one of the top five sides in the report, alongside mac and cheese, yams or sweet potatoes, mashed potatoes, and stuffing or dressing. Beyond the 67% who link it to Thanksgivings past, few want to change it: only 19% would change the recipe, Campbell’s says.
The soup question is where the company’s interest shows most. Campbell’s reports that 69% of Americans say the casserole is best made with cream of mushroom or cream of celery soup, and that 87% name Campbell’s Soup as their go-to for it.
Rebecca Duke, senior director of brand marketing at The Campbell’s Company, said in the release that sides are more central to the celebration than ever.
The 1955 Recipe Behind the Memory
The memory has a traceable starting point. According to Smithsonian Magazine, Dorcas Reilly created the casserole in 1955 while working as a supervisor in the home economics department of Campbell’s test kitchen in Camden, New Jersey, developing it for an Associated Press recipe feature. The original dish was called Green Bean Bake and, in Smithsonian’s account, was made from cream of mushroom soup, milk, soy sauce, black pepper, green beans and crunchy fried onions.
Reilly died in October 2018 at age 92. In its obituary, Food Processing reported that Campbell’s began printing the recipe on its cream of mushroom soup cans in 1960 and that she donated her original recipe card to the National Inventors Hall of Fame in 2002. The company called the dish “the mother of all comfort foods,” the magazine wrote.
Home cooks who want the familiar version without tying up the oven can look at this crockpot green bean casserole, a slow cooker take on the classic that keeps the oven free on a crowded Thanksgiving day.
How Much Soup Rides on This One Dish
The printed can label is one reason the casserole shows up in so many family traditions, and it is also why Campbell’s has a clear commercial stake in the results. The Food Processing obituary said Campbell’s estimated that 40 percent of the cream of mushroom soup sold in the United States goes toward making the casserole, especially at Thanksgiving.
The 2026 report points the same direction. Prepared Foods reported that Campbell’s says it sold nearly 40 million cans of Cream of Mushroom soup during the holiday period. Both figures come from the company, not from an outside audit.
Sides Are Taking Over the Thanksgiving Plan
The same Campbell’s report finds that 80% of Americans enjoy cooking the sides more than the turkey, up 11 points from 2023. About 86% will serve at least four sides, with a median of five, which Campbell’s says adds up to about 749 million sides.
Younger adults lean even further that way. Campbell’s reports that 65% of Gen Z and 56% of Millennials would be happy with a side-only meal. Mac and cheese is Gen Z’s top side for the second year running, and 57% of respondents call it the dish everyone can agree on.
A separate source offers a wider view of the holiday. CivicScience, in a November 5 post of consumer-reported data, says 82% of Americans plan to celebrate Thanksgiving and that cooking everything from scratch remains the most common plan at 43%.
With Thanksgiving on November 26, hosts planning several sides ahead of time may find the make-ahead casseroles collection useful for spreading the work over a few days.
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This article was produced with AI assistance and edited for accuracy against the sources linked above.
Image: Rick Kimpel from Spring, TX, USA – CC BY-SA 2.0/Wikimedia Commons