Food advertising tricks

by Nick Vagnoni, Posted Dec 8th 2005 @ 3:03PM

chicken leg Now, I know that this section of Consumer Reports dedicated to tricks of the food advertising trade clearly states that it's "4 kids," but that doesn't mean it isn't fun and interesting. On the contrary, it's probably more so. If you're in the business, or you've seen shows documenting food photography before, some of this may not be new to you. I know I'd heard of using glue (or hair tonic, as CR suggests) as a stand in for milk in cereal ads. Likewise for using shortening instead of ice cream. There were a couple other tricks I hadn't heard of though, like plumping up a piece of fried chicken by injecting it with mashed potatoes. Also, I'm not clear on how spraying a nectarine with althlete's foot spray will make it look like a peach, but I guess it gives it the necessary fuzz. Squirting dishwashing liquid into beverages to make them appear bubbly and hot was also one I hadn't heard of. The step-by-step prepping of a burger is also fun.

Source

Filed Under: Business, Cooking With Kids, Magazines

Chew on This

Royal Wedding Cake Details Revealed! - YumSugar

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Rules Of Bar Etiquette -- For The Bartender - HuffPost Food

Reader comments (Page 1 of 1)

12-08-2005 @3:23PM Punisher2k said... Another neat site is

http://pbskids.org/dontbuyit/advertisingtricks/foodadtricks.html

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12-08-2005 @6:40PM Crosius said... It's interesting to note that while Canada forbids using these kinds of alterations on the food item being sold by the ad, they can all be used on the other food in the ad.

So an ad for Oreos must have real Oreos, but the milk can be hair tonic or glue. Or that tasty icing can be spread on a carpet-foam cake.

Yuck.

Now I'm going to be looking at all the other stuff for something else besides the cleverly concealed word "SEX"
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12-09-2005 @2:10AM Mark said... Everything in that article sounds gross, except one: Fried chicken injected with mashed potatoes doesn't sound half bad.
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