Baby carrots to compete with junk food for children's lunch-boxes

Close to 50 carrot growers have banded together for a $25 million marketing campaign to get people to consider carrots instead of junk food for those lunch-boxes.

With school about to start, Bolthouse Farms and almost 50 other carrot growers have hired the ad agency Crispin Porter + Bogusky to come up with an ad and branding campign that will make baby carrots just as appealing (or more so) than junk food ads for children's lunches. USAtoday.com reports Jeff Dunn, Bolthouse Farms CEO and a former North America president at Coca-Cola, saying, "It's not an anti-junk-food campaign.It takes a page out of junk food's playbook and applies it to baby carrots." The salty snack food industry has a budget of $18 billion and the baby carrot industry has a budget of $1 billion. The new campaign sees baby carrots packaged in Doritos-like bags. Three different designs are planned. They are looking to have then sold out of cool school vending machines. There are tests already underway in Cincinnati and Syracuse, N.Y. They will be putting slogans like this on billboards and packs: "The original orange doodles." There will be special seasonal tie-ins. This Halloween will introduce us to "scarrots." They are offering a phone app powered by the sound of folks munching carrots in real time. Also, the campaign will air TV spots that tout baby carrots as extreme, futuristic and even sexy. Marketing any product has to have an appealing package. Children think food tastes better when there are cartoon characters on the packages. With that in mind the single serving bags of carrots with the new slogan "Eat 'Em Like Junk Food," might make you think of a bag of Cheetos.