Carrots, Carrots and More Carrots!

Did you ever think you'd hear that baby carrots could be considered junk food? My first reaction to this was, of course, "No way..." But after reading the article, "How Carrots Became The New Junk Food". It became a little more clear to me...

Carrots aren't really considered junk food (thank goodness), It was the way they were/are advertised. But it all started in the 1990's when baby carrots were invented. A local farmer named Mike Yurosek, was frustrated with the waste of carrots. Supermarkets expected carrots to be a particular size, shape, and color. Anything else had to be sold for juice or processing or animal feed, or just thrown away. So what Mike did was interesting and became a big hit. He just peeled a 'gross' part of a carrot, cut them in half and put them in bags for a few test batches to show customers. 

Baby carrots became a huge hit! Farmers began to plant fields with baby carrots in mind. This became a big deal, the thing no one expected, was that baby carrots seemed to make Americans eat more carrots. In the decade after they were introduced, carrot consumption doubled in the United States.

On a different note, Jeff Dunn became the new CEO of Coca-Cola, but three years before that, he was CEO of Bolthouse Farms. Dunn later put together a series surveys and discovered something interesting. People said they were eating as many carrots as they always had. But the numbers clearly showed they were buying fewer. It turned out, people were likely to keep carrots in the fridge. When the recession hit, though, people were more likely to buy regular carrots, instead of baby carrots, to save money. And unlike baby carrots, which dry out pretty quickly once a bag is opened, regular carrots keep a long time. So people were buying regular carrots and then not eating them, and not buying more until the carrots they had were finally gone or rotten.

 The Bolthouse comapny had never marketed its baby carrots. It just sent truckloads to stores, where they got piled up in the produce aisle. Dunn, then assembled a small team and studied advertising campaigns for agricultural products. So then, Dunn and his team began to think of ideas of how to market carrots in an interesting way.

They later all met for a conference in Colorado about how to market a carrot in an interesting way, "To have a great advertising idea, you have to get at the truth of the product," Farhang explains. "The truth about baby carrots is they possess many of the defining characteristics of our favorite junk food. They're neon orange, they're crunchy, they're dippable, they're kind of addictive." So thats what they decided to do...market carrots like junk food. 

How they imagined to do this was to individually package the carrots in a crinkly plastic, like potato-chips, and have bold junk food graphics on the packaging. It's a bit funny to think that we need to market carrots, a healthy vegetable, like it's a junk food so people will buy it. This, to me, is a little ridiculous. Only in America, the fattest county in the world, do we have to market something healthy as a junk food so people will buy it....