While you might be thinking something along the lines of Dorito’s or Cheetos, the answer in this case is CARROTS! As we saw in class, carrots have been started to be marketed as junk food… a very healthy one, that is.

Because this, looks more attractive than a carrot packages found in the vegetable aisle in the supermarket…

Marketing is all about looks and packaging. You can practically take any regular thing, place it in a nice box or bag, put up some ads that makes it attractive, and BAM the product sells. Take carrots for example, who wouldn’t want to eat carrots if they were cut into french fries or ritz cracker shapes, even if at the end they are still simply carrots? Another option is packaging them into chip-like bags, to give customers the similar feeling of munching on their favorite junk food snacks.

Another product I found with a similar marketing idea, are these gourmet freeze-dried fruit and vegetable snacks with no preservatives or chemicals added called Eat Your Heart Out. With a punny tittle, these snacks also appeal to the idea that eating healthy can be fun and have marketed their product in an eye-catching package design that could be confused for junk food. Here is their website.

With increasingly more health conscious individuals, this might work! Marketers of these products should target young children as well as their mothers and promote it within schools so that they are included in their lunch menus. By “sugar-coating” fruits and veggies to seem fun and hip by creative packaging, children and teens will be more willing to eat healthy, instead of looking at it as a chore. While this blog goes too far by saying that baby carrots might replace candies and other fattening snacks in trick-or-treating, we are very far from that and marketers should be content to limiting them for stuffing lunch boxes, not halloween bags.  Regardless, this trend might pose as an interesting opportunity for fruit and vegetable farmers and distributors to differentiate themselves from their many competitors.

While cookie monster wouldn’t agree to the idea, this trend toward healthier snaking is definitely the way to go!