Wednesday, May 20, 2009

What's with the new Lay's ads?

Posted by Owen Morris on Wed, May 20, 2009 at 10:30 AM

Driving along highways such as I-35 South or 70 West or 29 North, you're bound to see billboards for Lay's potato chips looking like this:

CIMG1552.JPG

The billboard is part of Lay's new nationwide ad campaign to promote itself as local. It's putting up specialized billboards and ads for every state in the union. Whether you're in Alaska or Florida, Lay's wants you to know it's your local mom-and-pop chip. Even if it's owned by Pepsi and has a market cap of more than $80 billion. 

Not surprisingly the ads have generated a good deal of negative response from locavores, including the writer who coined the term "locavore." She called Lay's the opposite of what local eating is about.

Notice none of the ads say "locally grown." That's because most of the potatoes aren't.

What

Lay's fails to point out is these potatoes are raised on huge

industrial farms -- the closest one to Kansas City is in Garden City, Kansas -- not by some lonesome farmer with a shovel.

The company is doing everything it can to imply that its chips are local, though. It's even set up a "Chip Tracker" Web site

that allows Classic Lay's snackers to see where their chips

come from. A half-eaten bag in my pantry turned out to be made in

Topeka, at one of 20 processing plants in the country. (The bag itself

said nothing about where the chips were made, but referenced the

company's headquarters in Plano, Texas.)

Note to Lay's: This town grew up with a true local potato chip maker -- Guy's -- so people know an impostor when they see one.

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