Michael Moss on Getting People to Eat Their Vegetables

Behind the Cover Story: Michael Moss on Getting People to Eat Their Vegetables

By RACHEL NOLAN

Tony Cenicola/The New York Times Michael Moss

Michael Moss, a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative reporter for The Times, wrote an article for this week’s health issue about creating an effective marketing campaign for broccoli. His last article for the magazine, about the processed-food industry, was adapted from his book, “Salt Sugar Fat: How the Food Giants Hooked Us.”

Generally The Times doesn’t commission ad campaigns for vegetables or for anything else. How did you come up with this rather odd idea?
The reporting started out in a very different direction. The idea was, how could we get blueberries to cost less so that people would be more open to buying them? This led me into the morass of supply issues like pricing. I spent weeks and weeks trying to untangle that. And I came out of the tunnel with a different question: how better to understand the demand side, which seemed more important. Farmers would never grow more fruits and vegetables if people didn’t want more of them. And that way the price would never go down. I had done some reporting for my book on the genius marketing strategies employed by the snack-food industry. I had spoken to the former president of Coca-Cola, Jeff Dunn, who had gone to work doing what he calls his “karmic debt” for a farm that grows baby carrots. And they had done a little campaign toying with the idea of stealing from the playbook of the junk-food industry to apply it to baby carrots, and it seems to have worked. I thought that baby carrots were too easy. I wondered if an ad agency could do something similar for one of the toughest sells in the produce aisle, broccoli.
So you chose broccoli because you thought it was, Bush Sr.-style, the hardest sell?
Exactly. From Bush Sr. to seeing it play out in my own family and knowing that it triggers bad memories for many baby boomers. But I also chose broccoli for being loaded with a huge number of nutrients. It has great potential, but a lot of negatives to overcome before selling more.
Did the ad-agency employees complain to you about the difficulty of selling broccoli?
They were really struggling. The Victors & Spoils employees were on a mission to try to understand what broccoli means to people, so they did a lot of interviews. They asked, for example, what people’s one-word associations with broccoli were. These were things like “healthy” and “good for you.” And it really seemed you couldn’t sell based on these criteria. That’s what the government has been trying and failing to do for years. People associate broccoli with something that wouldn’t help sell it. After the ad people had wandered around Colorado talking to farmers and chefs and people in schools, when they asked me what my single-word association with broccoli was, it was “despair.” I had no thoughts on how they would come up with anything at all.
The campaign they finally came up with was to pick a fight with kale, based on Pepsi versus Coca-Cola. How was it that that war helped raise sales of both?
I thought they were going to go after French fries or potato chips. Because ultimately that is what we are talking about here from a public health standpoint. Some of these people who had worked for Coca-Cola knew the secret of the great soda war, which is that when Pepsi went after Coca-Cola, or vice versa, ultimately sales of both went up. When the people at Victor & Spoils looked around for the big shot in the produce aisle, they realized it was kale. And they took off after kale. At first I was aghast — because the mission is not to drive down sales of kale — until they explained to me that sales of both would go up. Marketing people call this “buzz.” Of course, “43 percent less pretentious than kale” is obviously tongue-in-cheek.
That was just the first phase, which would play well in Brooklyn or Portland. They came up with another stage to go after people who weren’t paying much attention to vegetables at all. And that’s when they came up with the “alpha” vegetable. The idea was broccoli as a big, powerful vegetable that could appeal to both women and men. The idea is to push emotional buttons of both groups. That’s what the ad people study and know about. And for that second group they came up with big, muscular ideas, like roasting broccoli in a helicopter over a volcano.
One of my criteria in choosing Victor & Spoils was that they let me sit in on their creation of this campaign. I happen to think that the video that Gabe Johnson has done to accompany this story is just fantastic. It takes you inside a “Mad Men”-like setting where real ad-agency people are struggling and ultimately triumphing. It is so much fun to watch them work. They spend most of their time selling consumer goods that are arguably very questionable for the world’s health, and so it is fun to watch them use their talents to do some potential good for the world.
Victor & Spoils did this campaign free for The Times, as an example, but might broccoli growers seize on it and actually roll it out?
Over the course of reporting this, back in June, people at the Produce Marketing Association started seeing the light on their marketing practices. They used to think, like the government, that all they had to do was say vegetables were healthy. They now know that they have to do something bigger. They have also come to realize that it doesn’t have to cost tens of millions of dollars to buy TV advertising. Social media is more affordable. That’s critical because produce farmers have thinner margins than those who make other products in the grocery store. Picking up on this campaign might cost about $3 million to $7 million, depending how big you wanted to make it. That’s within the means of the Produce Marketing Association.