I've long thought that one of the big problems in getting kids to eat more fruits and vegetables (grownups, too, for that matter) is that they just sit there, unwrapped, in piles at the back of the store, while bright, snazzily-packaged junk snacks and candy scream at you from the register's impact rack.
So much of our material culture is about image, brand and packaging, and your average carrot or peach or lettuce doesn't have any. What if you could just package produce differently?
That's the challenge that ad agency Crispin Porter + Bogusky has taken up. This isn't some quixotic design school project or pro bono sideshow, either — it's a serious, $25 million campaign for the carrot industry.
It'll be interesting to see whether this makes baby carrots as addictive as Cheetos. The snack food industry invests hundreds of millions of dollars in engineering tastes to produce craving. But then God's no slouch in the flavor design department, either.
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The high-profile ad agency is launching an ambitious $25 million campaign to help the carrot industry compete with the junk food industry. The campaign is being launched with the help of almost 50 carrot growers, including carrot behemoth Bolthouse Farms.
USA Today describes some of the ideas being tossed around: packaging carrots in snack food-like bags, selling them in vending machines (tests are already underway in school vending machines in Cincinnati and Syracuse, N.Y) , plastering carrot-themed billboards with slogans like "The original orange doodles," and promoting seasonal tie-ins (the Halloween tie-in is "scarrots," of course). The official campaign will launch next week, with a series of web ads and an iPhone app that will be…
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A school in Ohio has installed an "all carrot vending machine," reports the Middletown Journal, or more precisely, an all baby-carrot vending machine. The machine was installed by Bolthouse Farms, one of the nation's leading grower of baby carrots (which aren't really "babies" at all, but are usually made from blemished or otherwise "rejected" carrots) and one of the farms involved with the national marketing campaign. Bolthouse also put one in a Syracuse, N.Y. school, stocked with 300 bags of baby carrots at 50 cents a bag.
Skeptics will of course tell you how this story ends -- lonely veggie vending machines ignored by students spoiled by Big Food's ad-driven, sweet and salty snacks. But, no, says the Journal:
Reaction was decidedly positive at Mason High, according to George Coates, the school's assistant principal.
"It hadn't been an hour after they filled the machines, that we had students coming in and purchasing baby carrots," Coates said.
Here's the dirty little secret that many of you childless types might not realize. When kids are hungry, they eat what's there. If carrots are the only snack option, then that's what they'll eat.
And even better, in the Ohio school, teachers have incorporated the vending machine program into the curriculum by asking students to come up with competing marketing campaigns to boost carrot sales. Students getting students to eat their veggies. Nice!
The point is, reforming school food isn't rocket science. If creative efforts are made to put healthy foods in schools and to get junk food out, kids' diets will improve. What we're really fighting over is money and who decides what our kids get to eat. Right now, it's the big processed-food manufacturers and their allies on Capitol Hill who have that power, at least during school hours. Keeping junk food (oh, sorry, I mean "competitive foods") in schools has become a de-facto way to privatize school-food costs. Schools make money on junk food so that they can afford the costs the government doesn't pick up in providing free or low-cost lunches to kids. And Big Food loves the existing system because it hooks kids on their brands from as young an age as possible.
But let's not pretend this is about kids' willingness to eat fruit and veggies. The stakes are a whole lot bigger.
http://www.grist.org/article/food-2010-09-21-schools-carrot-vending-machines-a-success/