Colorful marketing
Peterson, Jasmine
MARKETING
Here’s how growers can use the 5 A Day The Color Way campaign to sell their produce.
WHEN you were younger, your mother would stand over you to make sure you ate your greens. Now, with the latest Produce For Better Health (PBH) Foundation campaign, you must also remember to eat your blues, purples, whites, yellows, oranges, and reds.
The new 5 A Day The Color Way campaign uses colors as the vehicle for consumers to select a wide variety of fruits and vegetables that will give them the benefits of a unique and varied mixture of vitamins and nutrients. Each color group provides a wide range of minerals, fiber, and phytochemicals your body needs to maintain good health, and if you eat one serving from each color group per day, you reduce the risk of cancer and heart disease.
“The bottom line is to drive people to consume more fruits and vegetables,” says Lori Baer, PBH’s director of public relations and production. “We want to build in the consumer’s mind that eating a serving of fruits and vegetables everyday isn’t just an important thing to know, it’s an essential thing to do.”
According to Baer, by consuming fruits and vegetables you are not only improving your health, but you are also lowering future health care costs.
Jump On The Bandwagon
The consumer is not the only one to reap the benefits of this campaign.
The grower has an opportunity to use 5 A Day The Color Way to market their produce. According to PBH, the color marketing direction provides an umbrella strategy to increase sales for fresh, frozen, canned, and dried fruits and vegetables, and juices.
Baer says the best way for fruit and vegetable growers to jump on the bandwagon is to advertise the campaign. “When a lettuce grower, for example, is packaging the product, he or she can insert the 5 A Day The Color Way packet,” she says. “The more that the campaign is advertised in produce packaging the more we can get the message out.”
Give It Your Own Spin
Driscoll’s, although not a member of the color way program, is a longtime supporter of the campaign. “The company has embraced the campaign,” says Baer. “They have taken the initiative to put their own spin on it by having healthy messages that revolve around the color red.” According to Baer, when other growers see this, it becomes a message for everyone involved in the industry. “It lets the growers know that they can customize the campaign and use it for their own purposes.”
Dole Food is one of the many businesses that has adopted the campaign. “We have been involved with 5 A Day since 1991,” says Amy Myrdal, senior manager for the Dole 5 A Day Program. “We were actually one of the founding members. We figured that doing anything to promote produce was good for the company.”
According to Myrdal, the campaign is an excellent way for growers to catch the attention of the consumer. “The color wheel gives consumers a mental picture,” she says. “Growers can identify their produce with a color and market it that way. Since we have a large variety of produce, we can use every color on the wheel.”
The number of growers that are using the 5 A Day The Color Way campaign to market their product is increasing. “I have seen from the number of growers that we have that it has got to be working,” Baer says.
If you want more information on the 5 A Day The Color Way campaign, including ordering marketing and promotional materials, contact the Produce For Better Health Foundation at 302-235-2329.
E-mail questions or comments about this article to afg_edit@meisternet.com.
By Jasmine Peterson Editorial Assistant
Copyright Meister Publishing Company Mar 2003
Provided by ProQuest Information and Learning Company. All rights Reserved
