Eat em like junk food

Chapter 17

Marketing Baby Carrots Like Junk Food

Can marketing encourage people to snack on baby carrots as if they were junk food? That’s what

California-based Bolthouse Farms has set out to do, with the help of Colorado advertising agency

Crispin Porter + Bogusky. Bolthouse CEO Jeff Dunn, a former Coca-Cola marketing executive,

remembers thinking that his firm’s baby carrots are “a perfect snack”—low-calorie, inexpensive,

good tasting, and nutritious. “But people aren’t eating as much of them as we’d like. So what do

we do?”

Crispin’s advertising experts told Dunn that baby carrots have a lot in common with junk food.

“They’re neon orange, they’re crunchy, they’re dippable, they’re kind of addictive,” said Omid

Farhang, the agency’s creative director. Baby carrots may be healthy, but Dunn wanted to avoid

messages that discuss nutrition, which he calls “the rational approach.” Instead, the agency aimed

to reposition baby carrots by emphasizing their eat-anywhere, bite-size snackability and

associating them with skateboarding and other popular, contemporary activities. “It’s about

getting baby carrots into a different category,” says Crispin’s CEO.

What baby carrots needed was the right positioning, messages, packaging, and distribution. A

new campaign was born. Crispin created a catchy slogan: “Baby carrots: Eat ’em like junk food.”

Next, they designed a flashy new bag, much like the packaging that chips come in, with a window

so buyers can see that they’re buying fresh vegetables. It set up a Twitter account and YouTube

channel to reach out to social media-savvy consumers, tested three TV commercials, and printed

store displays promoting baby carrots as “the original orange doodle.” Also, the agency developed

colorful baby carrot vending machines that resemble the machines used to sell chips and other

snacks. Finally, it posted engaging online content, marketing baby carrots with fun games and

apps.

During test-marketing, Bolthouse found that its sales in the test cities were as much as 12

percent higher than its sales in non–test-markets. The vending machines sold as many as 90 snack

packs each week, and a number of schools called about putting the machines in cafeteria areas. In

short, baby carrot snacks were beginning to catch on.

To keep the campaign fresh, Crispin added new online content and designed additional

packaging alternatives to catch the eye of shoppers. Meanwhile, Bolthouse experiments with new

flavored baby carrots, following the lead of snack marketers that add flavors to their basic chips

or pretzels. This variety gives novelty-seekers more options and may even win over snackers who

prefer flavored carrots to plain ones. Other vegetable and fruit marketers are paying close attention

because the marketing that makes baby carrots appealing as junk food could very well work for

apples and other foods.

Baby carrots aren’t going to replace every other snack food on the shelf, but sales are growing

little by little as more consumers get the message. For example, U.S. consumers buy millions of

bags of chips, order millions of pizza slices, and stock up on fizzy soft drinks for Super Bowl

Sunday. Lately, however, baby carrots are starting to score: Bolthouse Farms now ships 28 percent

more baby carrots during the week leading up to the Super Bowl than in an ordinary week.i

CASE QUESTIONS

1. Which is likely to be more effective—marketing baby carrots to young consumers or to parents

of young consumers? Why?

2. Does the marketing of baby carrots raise any social or temporal dilemmas?

3. Is there a potential “dark side” to marketing baby carrots as junk food?

4. Do you agree with this strategy of marketing baby carrots as junk food instead of as a healthy

snack? Explain your answer.

i Valerie Bauerlein, “Carrots Vie for a Spot on Game Day,” Wall Street Journal, February 2,

2012, www.wsj.com; David Wright and Mary Marsh, “Baby Carrots: The Next Snack Food?”

ABC News, February 7, 2012, http://abcnews.go.com; and Douglas McGray, “How Carrots

Became the New Junk Food,” Fast Company, April 1, 2011, www.fastcompany.com.

http://www.fastcompany.com/