The Baby Carrot industry is launching an all out campaign to promote their product as an alternative to junk food. The "Eat 'em Like Junk Food" effort will be out soon and includes TV spots, an interactive website, "Bunch of Carrot Farmer's" YouTube channel and junk food-like packaging.
Baby carrot manufacturers are responding to a dip in sales and hope to re-brand their product as an "extreme" snacking alternative. Two seconds on their site - www.babycarrots.com - and you'll be extremely annoyed with the theme "song"...but, the idea is to re-program the way you think about baby carrots.
Sure, it's hard to make carrots cool, but the baby carrot folks have a lot going for them. The fact that their industry even exists is based on a stroke of pure genius by California farmer Mike Yurosek: take unusable and unsellable nubs of bigger carrots and grind them down to finger-size "baby" carrots. You eliminate the most annoying part of eating carrots - the peeling - and you get to mark the price up because of the convenience you're affording your customers!
According to the USDA Nutrient Database, each medium-sized baby carrot has 0.3 grams of fiber - so every three baby carrots is about 1 gram of fiber and you would need 15 baby carrots to get a 5 gram serving - or roughly, 1/6 of your daily fiber needs.
Two-thirds of the baby carrots sold in the US are grown in Bakersfield, CA. And, The World Carrot Museum (that's right) has some more history on the baby carrot, available here.
