Photo: [ebarrera], Flickr
Baby carrots are getting an extreme makeover.
It seems the only people who turn to the diminutive vegetable for their afternoon snack are guilt-ridden dieters and toddlers, but a $25 million re-branding campaign by a consortium of carrot growers is aiming to change that.
Forget the fact that carrots are good for you. Instead, the campaign appears to be focused on a crafty bit of marketing-based camouflage: if you put baby carrots in a snack-sized potato chip bag and give the bag the tricked-out POW! of, say, a bag of Doritos, can you convince people to "Eat 'Em Like Junk Food," as the new slogan says?
Of course, it doesn't take a Ph.D. in semantics to note the comparative simile there. "Like junk food" is a slightly hipper way of saying that they're not junk food. Yes, they're orange; yes, they're oblong; yes, they crunch -- but for better or for worse, they're no Cheetos.
As part of the campaign, carrot growers are also planning seasonal tie-ins (such as "scarrots" for Halloween), some weird-sounding phone app of people actually eating carrots, and TV commercials that, according to USA Today, "tout baby carrots as extreme, futuristic and even, yes, sexy."

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8-31-2010 @5:28AM gudio said... I'll keep eating em like carrots. You know, dipped in artery clogging ranch dressing.
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9-01-2010 @6:07PM robert wurzer said... I love carrots but in every bag there's blood pressue raising sodium...sad but true
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9-01-2010 @7:27PM Sue said... I love carrots......for a vegetable. But face it, when you're craving junk, carrots aren't gonna do it. Hmmm. Maybe they can package them with a nice high fructose corn syrup and hydrogenated fat sauce . :)
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