"baby carrots" news and stories

Last year, we told you that carrots companies were using junk-food marketing techniques to gain a foothold in the snack market. Now Fast Company has the whole story behind the meteoric rise of baby carrots.

Here are the Cliff Notes: About 10 years ago, somebody tried to figure out what to do with the leftovers that resulted from supermarkets insisting that carrots all be a uniform size. Baby carrots were invented, and they become more popular than the real thing. But when the recession hit, people went back to regular carrots because they were perceived as less of a luxury item.
Oh, dear, what to do?

Spend $25 million to hire the famously creative (and often controversial) ad agency of Crispin Porter + Bogusky (the agency behind Burger King's Delete 10 Friends and Get a Free Whopper campaign) to convince America that, far from being healthy, carrots were the ideal junk food (hey, they're already orange, the same color as Orange Doodles). The idea was to package them like Cheetos and pretzels, in snack-like bags, and to stick them into vending machines (see "like Cheetos and pretzels"). So far, sales are way up -- turns out we're all a slave to marketing. But in this case, that's a good thing.

Read the whole story at Fast Company.

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."

When they first hit the mainstream, I was totally in favor of baby carrots. It happened sometime during my high school years and I remember being able to buy a turkey sandwich on a bagel and a small bag of baby carrots from the cafeteria for $1.50. It felt like a huge bargain and it gave me the sense that I was eating a fairly healthy meal, since nothing in my lunch had taken a trip through the deep fryer that the cafeteria workers loved so much.

Friday night I was at my local Acme, and I came across pre-packaged pineapple wedges, orange slices and grapes, pre-plucked from their stems. They were all packed in a plastic tray, which was then wrapped in cellophane. They came in four-packs, so the wrapped trays were then swathed again in an additional layer of cellophane, to keep them bundled together. I blame baby carrots for these overly packaged fruits, as they were the first product that made us accustomed to ready-to-eat produce.

I think we've gone too far. I know that people claim that these products increase the amount of fruits and vegetables that people eat, but how hard is it to slice an orange yourself? I know that fresh pineapple is a pain to cut, but if you don't want to trouble yourself with the minutia of taking it apart yourself, you can buy yourself a gadget that will do it in seconds.

What do you guys think about the pre-cut, pre-packaged fruit and vegetable trend?

I was talking to a friend earlier and was startled to find out that she thought the "baby carrots" in the market were really baby carrots. So I figured I should post about them for all of those who haven't heard the news.

In 2006, most baby carrots come from Bakersfield, California, and make up a third of sales of fresh carrots in the United States. These baby carrots are really full grown carrots that have been cut into 2" pieces and smoothed and shaped to look like baby carrots, the majority of which would have been thrown away as culls and few to cattle or just destroyed. In the late 1980's Mike Yurosek a farmer in California got tired of seeing 400 tons of carrots a day being discarded and came up with a way to shape and form them into what look like baby carrots. The rest is an American success story with raw baby carrots making up 1/3 of the sales of fresh raw carrots and are one of the top vegetables consumed in the US.

This isn't a bad thing because due to the popularity of carrots, new breeds were developed that are sweeter, less bitter and woody, crisp, and with more vitamins and beta-carotene. It used to be that you had to peel carrots so they wouldn't be too bitter to eat. Now looking back I can't remember when I did more than wash carrots before using. Peeling for me is a thing of the distant past.

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