Michael Pollan has been urging “If You Can’t Say It, Don’t Eat It” for a while now, and slowly consumers have become more wary of ingredients pronounceable only by chemists and more inclined to question, What is my food? This anxiety is having an impact not only on brands that sell chemical-packed products but on any packaged-food marketer—in Argentina, rumors began circulating that Lay’s chips aren’t made with real potatoes, according to a PepsiCo ConoSur exec quoted in Ad Age. So Lay’s embraced Maximum Disclosure (one of our 10 Trends for 2010) to set the record straight in a unique way.
Set to start traveling around to Buenos Aires supermarkets, the Lay’s Machine looks like a vending machine but requires a shopper to deposit a potato (provided as part of the promotion) instead of coins. What follows is a “hyper-realistic” video of the chip-making process with the illusion that “your” potato is being turned into chips. At the video’s end, a bag of chips drops into the slot, heated to give the sensation that it really was your potato being transformed.
As customers see that the product is just made from real potatoes, vegetable oil and salt, they can feel assured that the “natural” claim is authentic. More engaging than an online video or classic promotion, the Lay’s Machine is a fun, interactive way to assuage people’s fears that they’re consuming something strange and unnatural by showing that neither is the case.
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