The Lay’s® Locavore Alert

The Lay’s® brand is about halfway through its “taking it to the streets" guerilla marketing campaign. If you’re in New York, Boston, Detroit, Chicago, Los Angeles or Dallas, the company explains you will have the opportunity to visit a rural farm experience in the middle of your town.

What you encounter is a 70-foot long by 10-foot wide traveling greenhouse with interactive stations and the chance to talk to a potato farmer because, of course, urbanites are completely stumped when it comes to knowing what potato chips are made from. Yes, this is the local food movement as interpreted by a major packaged goods company.

Coincidentally, the first week of August was National Farmers Market Week. The number of farmers markets in the United States grew 16 percent over last year. Most of the growth came from urban centers and the cities with the highest number of farmers markets in California, New York, Illinois, Michigan, Iowa and Massachusetts … right where the Lay’s farm is heading.

About a year ago, Lay’s started to feature potato farmers in advertising and billboards. I saw the billboards all over northern Michigan, with the message “We buy our potatoes locally." Great, but are they processed there? There are some 20 processing plants in the United States but there’s still a lot of hauling around of potatoes and chips. But OK, local is what you’re selling.

According to Lay’s PR, the company buys its 2.5 billion pounds of potatoes processed each year from 80 farms across the United States. My hunch is that these are not what consumers think of as “local" farms, but fairly large farming enterprises.

The campaign has unfolded in radio and newspaper announcements in each of the cities visited. Online, the social media effort is pretty easy to spot … Mommy blogs. If you Google “Lay’s farm tour" in the blog section, you’ll find a number of them with nearly exact information and wording about the tour that is “spreading simple happiness." Sure, lots of bloggers would just make that up. So, it seems that all the bases were covered. Except at the event itself.

The tour visited Chicago on Monday Aug. 9 and set up in Millennium Park. Gorgeous day, lots of people milling around downtown. And only about 10 people at high noon at the Lay’s farm-on-wheels. A couple folks from our office went to check it out and reported that no one from Lay’s approached them, nor did they find any farmers to talk to. And there was no signage directing people to the event.

We all know what “green-washing" is. Two more words are entering the common vernacular … “farm-washing" and “local-washing." I think the Lay’s promotion is borderline. Nothing really wrong with bringing a farm to the city, I guess. But walk two blocks to the Daley Center and see the plaza teeming with people at the weekly farmers market and perhaps companies should appreciate that urbanites aren’t really as clueless as they think. Cynical is more like it.