For a sixty-one year old dude, I'm on the cutting edge of what's happening, man. (Though those last three words date me.) In fact, I'm the handle that anticipated the cutting edge four years ago.
Back in 2006 I was one of the few bloggers covering the baby carrot scene. My "Baby carrot community shaken to roots" post had a terrific title which should have won some kind of award.
However, I didn't exactly make eating baby carrots seem like a mucho macho activity.
I eat a lot of baby carrots. My wife makes me. At the age of 57 I still need babying. “This is why,” Laurel tells me, “married men live longer than single men. They’ve got wives who nag them to eat healthy.”
After I’ve chomped down a Gardenburger on a slice of whole wheat bread for lunch, often I’ll hear a voice coming from the kitchen. “Have you eaten your veggies?!” “No, I haven’t,” I reply. A few minutes later Laurel will hand me a bowl of baby carrots, celery pieces, and sliced cucumber. I dutifully munch away on it.
Now, in today's Portland Oregonian I read about a new baby carrot marketing campaign. It appears that baby carrot producers have recognized that their vegetable needs an image makeover so that guys and gals will eat them even if a mothering woman doesn't tell them to.
Baby carrot farmers are launching a campaign that pitches the little, orange, crunchy snacks as daring, fun and naughty — just like junk food.
A group of 50 producers hopes the 'Eat 'Em Like Junk Food' effort starting next week will double the $1 billion market in two or three years.
The goal is to get people to think of baby carrots as a brand they can get excited about — not just a plain, old vegetable. A website, http://www.babycarrots.com, features metal music and deep male voices chanting "Baby. Carrots. Extreme." On social networking site Twitter, the campaign's account suggests people eat them "like there's no tomorrow (maybe there won't be...)"
Wanting to see how hip (oops, dated myself again) baby carrots have gotten, naturally I zipped right on over to babycarrots.com -- after wishing that many years ago I'd had the idea of snapping up that domain name for eventual resale.
Disappointingly, I noticed that while the words "The world's first carrot-crunch-powered video game" was over an iPhone image, "coming soon" was underneath it. Just to be sure, I fired up my iPhone 4 and checked the app store.
Nope. Nothing popped up on a "baby carrots" search. Closest match was "Bobby Carrot 1," a game that didn't appear to be carrot-crunch-powered, so I ignored it.
The web site has samples of what appear to be genuine snack food packaging for baby carrots. Great idea.
Having been a vegetarian since I was twenty-one, it was disturbing to raise my daughter on a meatless diet from her birth -- only to find that vegetables weren't one of her favorite food groups. If she'd been able to buy baby carrots in Xtreme bags at a high school vending machine, her adolescent nutritional status might have been better.
I'm looking forward to seeing how successful the baby carrot marketing campaign is. Currently I frequently buy the "Bunny Luv" brand, which was the original packaged baby carrot.
Bunny Luv is a cute name, but isn't going to attract too many young guys to baby carrots. Maybe they need to ditch the rabbit logo and go with a more enticing image of a human kind of bunny.
check that Gardenburger:
http://www.thepetitionsite.com/9/stop-making-veggie-burgers-with-a-neurotoxin/
Posted by: Randy | September 06, 2010 at 01:47 PM