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Baby carrots launch snack attack

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By D.L. Stewart, Contributing columnist 6:53 PM Saturday, September 4, 2010

Adults just don’t get it. Despite generation upon generation of evidence to the contrary, they still think they can fool kids into eating food that’s good for them.

In the latest misguided effort, the $1 billion baby carrot industry is betting it can dupe kids — and other snack food eaters — into giving up their Doritos, Fritos and Cheetos in exchange for little bags of healthy orange tubers. It’s backing up its wager with a $25 million advertising campaign that made its debut this week.

In an attempt to convince kids that baby carrots are cool, USA Today reports, the campaign includes:

• Billboards with the message, “The original orange doodles.”

• Packaging them in chips-style bags and selling them in “cool” school vending machines.

• Referring to them as “scarrots” when Halloween approaches.

• Creating a phone app powered by the sound of people munching carrots.

If we must have kids, I’m all in favor of them being healthy. But, as much as I would love the opportunity to hear strangers on my Blackberry chewing carrots whenever I feel like it, I think the $25 million could be better spent trying to convince kids to listen to the greatest hits of Rosemary Clooney.

Not that I have anything personal against carrots, which my mother always told me were good for my eyesight. As a child, I attempted to grow them in our backyard garden, although they never came out of the ground perfectly formed the way they did at the grocery store. Mostly they were all gnarled and looked as if they had severe arthritis.

And one of mom’s best desserts was carrot cake, which I am sure would have been healthy for me if she had altered the recipe a bit and omitted the two cups of refined white flour, the cup and half of sugar and the cream cheese frosting.

Today, there’s always a bag of baby carrots in our refrigerator. But most of them get eaten by our dog, who needs to lose weight because apparently there are more calories in that stuff he licks off the sidewalk than we suspected. He’s still fat, but at least he doesn’t need glasses yet.

There are kids, I’m sure, who already love carrots and would be happy to trade their Pringles for a bag of them in the school cafeteria. There also are kids who would rather read the collected works of Friedrich Nietzsche than spend all day playing Pokeman Battle Revolution.

Somehow, though, I can’t picture an ad campaign, no matter how slick, convincing kids that carrots are cool. And I’m not alone. As one consultant observes, “the guilt is missing.”

But maybe if they deep-fried them and coated them with chocolate ...

Contact D.L. Stewart at dlstew_2000@yahoo.com

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