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Baby carrots go junk. I’m pretty curious how this $25M marketing campaign is going to play out. Can Baby Carrot, a $1B industry, compete with the $18B salty snack food industry by repackaging carrots to look like junk food? Per USA Today, the campaign includes:
- 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. (<— my personal fave)
- 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.
I quite like the campaign. It made me finally research what I’ve been curious about for a while - baby carrots. What are they really?
Well what we typically see are baby-cut carrots. Which are carrots. Fully grown, adult carrots, that are shaved down to cute, bite-size, baby form. This practice started when a farmer did not want to waste and discard his unsightly, rotting carrots. At the time, about 70% of his carrot crop was too bent, broken, or twisted to sell to consumers. He, instead, cut them down, shaving off the ugly parts, and started a baby carrot revolution! Carrots are now bred specifically to be baby carrots - with more sugar and a brighter and more even orange color. They also are often bathed in chlorine, an antimicrobial treatment to reduce contamination on the skinless product. Ironic that something created to prevent waste seems pretty wasteful itself.
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“Things that are made from organic material age and decay, especially when they stop being alive. A piece of home-baked bread, say, left on your kitchen counter, will get moldy relatively fast. Lord knows what some ground beef would smell like after a week. But the artist Sally Davies has been photographing one McDonald’s hamburger and fries every day for 137 days. They look basically exactly the same.” via GOOD
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on epigenetics
I recently learned about epigenetics and found it to be super interesting so I thought I’d share. It has long been thought that our genes are our destiny. Our DNA, which we pass onto our children, cannot be affected by our actions. If we smoke or eat poorly, we’re putting ourselves at risk, sure. But certainly not our unborn children, right? Well, actually, a kind of new field of epigenetics shows that may not be the case.
Epigenetics is the study of changes in gene expression that are caused by factors other than the underlying DNA sequence. I’m not the most savvy on molecular biology or gene expression (though I will be soon.. thanks mom), but basically gene expression is governed by a molecular body that is outside of the gene - the epigenome - which determines how strongly that gene is expressed. The epigenome is affected by environmental factors like diet, stress, drugs. It then imprints upon the gene and not only affects the individual, but can be passed on to successive generations.
Per a Time article from earlier this year, ”we all know that you can truncate your own life if you smoke or overeat, but it’s becoming clear that those same bad behaviors can also predispose your kids — before they are even conceived — to disease and early death.”
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On a(nother) personal and New York related note - I finally lived my dream and went to Montauk. I don’t know what I’ve been doing the last three years.. it is gorgeous out there.
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Want to feel insignificant for about an hour? Go see the Hubble IMAX movie at the American Museum of Natural History. I sat with my mouth agape the whole time. Here’s the trailer.
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Watching the aforementioned biology videos brought back faint memories of my mom making me watch art history lectures as a child. They were narrated by Sister Wendy. She arrives on scene at 0:38 and is pictured below. Amazing.
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