Carrots turning into junk-food...

Okay, maybe that title is a bit misleading- carrots are still going to be as healthy, crunchy, and delicious as ever... but the bag they come in is getting a makeover. A junk-food makeover.

Baby carrot companies are joining forces and planning to let Crispin, Porter + Bogusky spend $25 million of their hard-earned carrot money to repackage and rebrand baby carrots for the masses. The USA Today article provided these campaign plans:

•Packaged in Doritos-like bags. Three different designs are planned.

•Sold out of cool school vending machines. Tests are underway in Cincinnati and Syracuse, N.Y.

•Sporting slogans like this on billboards and packs: "The original orange doodles."

•Touting seasonal tie-ins. Coming this Halloween: scarrots.

•Offering a phone app powered by the sound of folks munching carrots in real time.

•Airing TV spots that tout baby carrots as extreme, futuristic and even, yes, sexy.

The idea is that packaging baby carrots like their junk-food competitors will make kids think carrots are as cool and delicious as other bagged snacks and will taste just as good. Or that seeing a bag of carrots in a vending machine of junk food will eventually make people equate carrots with a fun treat instead of a healthy vegetable.

I am so entertained by this. My first thought is "what is this world coming to when we have to disguise health food with junk food packaging to trick people into eating it" but that is an issue that really cannot be tackled in one blog post. What can be addressed though is how fabulous it is (for everyone in advertising business) that now even individual vegetables require a $25 million campaign to make people eat them. Not just brands, not just products- even an individual vegetable that has been on this planet forever requires advertising services.

It's going to be really interesting to see what CP+B comes up with to pump up the country's interest in carrots and even more interesting to see if other vegetable industries follow suit and roll out big campaigns. It seems like in today's eco-friendly, organic-food climate, this could be surprisingly successful and do really good things for America's veggie industries and our country's waistlines. It may seem a little bit crazy to those of us who have grown up with Cheetos as junk food and carrots as health food, but if we begin seeing both these things as equally cool and equally tasty, maybe this could be the start of a healthier lifestyle for all of us?