Unchained in America

When Lisa and I drove along I-75 in Chattanooga this past weekend, we noticed a Lay’s® billboard on the side of the road that said:

PROUDLY MADE IN TENNESSEE

and Across America

That sign told us that the “Lay’s Local” marketing campaign had come to Tennessee. It also told us that the Lays marketers are taking advantage the many ways in which people define “local.”

What Locally Grown Means

Many people look askance at Lay’s claim to be a local food company. And for good reason. Local food is grown on small farms that grow a variety of crops and produce enough food to

distribute to stores and consumers who live within a short distance of that farm. In fact, all stages of food production — growing, processing, distributing, and consuming — are done within that geographical area. The idea of local consumption of local products is very important because when you buy local, the money you spend goes back into your local economy.

The “Lay’s Local” ad campaign tries to focus on all four stages:

• Growing — Potatoes are grown at “local” farms
• Processing — Lays makes the “locally grown” potatoes into potato chips at Frito-Lay processing plants scattered across the country in 18 states.
• Distributing — If the chips are made locally, they must be distributed locally.
• Consuming — When you buy a bag of Lay’s Potato Chips, the money you spend stays in your community.

Buying locally grown food gives the consumer — you and me — direct control over the quality of the food we buy. For example, if we want organic food and a farmer grows nonorganic food, we won’t buy from that farmer. To gain our business, the farmer will start to grow organic food.

Buying locally grown food also is about relationships. If the farmer sells to a local store, the farmer and the store employees get to know and trust each other. And if the farmer sells directly to us at farmers markets, we and the farmer get to know and trust each other.

The Ambiguity of “Local”

Unfortunately, no one can agree on what the term “local” means. Why? Because the term is ambiguous — for two reasons.

First, there’s no agreement about how close to the you the food must be produced or grown to be considered local. Some distances include:

• 500 miles away
• 100 miles away
• Within the region in which you live
• Within your state
• Within 7 hours’ journey of you or the store (Whole Foods’ definition)
• Within a day’s journey or less of you or the store

Food produced or grown within 100 miles of where you live seems to be the most commonly accepted definition of “local.” At least, that was the conclusion of a survey conducted in 2008 by the Leopold Center for Sustainable Agriculture. Given a choice of several distances, over two-thirds of the people surveyed chose 100 miles.

This 100-mile definition is important. In a lecture reported online in the Iowa State Daily, Andrew Larson, a small farm and sustainable agriculture specialist, said that big companies (such as Frito-Lay) will have a hard time breaking down the perception that local food is grown within a 100-mile-radius of where you live:

Local is the one thing that’s really hard to sort of repeat or co-opt by a larger scale company. If somebody out in California wants to sell local produce, they’re going to have a hard time convincing people in Iowa that California produce is local.

Second, to further complicate matters, some people think that distance has nothing to do with defining “local.” For example, if you live in Chattanooga, Tennessee, and buy food from a farm 20 or 30 miles over the border in Georga, you might consider that food locally grown. But someone else in Chattanooga buying the same food from the same farm might not consider the food local because it comes from another state.

The Lay’s marketers are assuming we’ll uncritically use our own definitions of “local” when we read their ads. By doing that, we’ll buy into their campaign’s message that Lay’s Potato Chips are a local food.

Food with a Story

In his book The Omnivore’s Dilemma, Michael Pollan talks about Industrial Organic farming and what he calls “supermarket pastoral.” What he means by supermarket pastoral is that industrial organic farms do more than just produce or grow organic food. Instead, they grow food with a story. And that story makes us, the consumer, feel good about purchasing that food — even if the story might be distorted or downright false.

For example, the pastoral story of the “free range” chicken whose breast you’re buying might say that it spent its life walking around outside in the sunlight. But the real story could be that it actually spent all of its life cramped in a coop and only shortly before it was slaughtered did it have access to a door leading into a small yard — a door it never went through.

In his lecture, Andrew Larson takes this “supermarket pastoral” concept and applies it to the definition of “local.” What most people are concerned about, he thinks, is not the distance traveled by the food they eat, but

the story behind that particular food. They want to be able to see the farmer’s face who produced it, they want to have been able to visit his farm to see his production method — develop some relationships and trust.

Food with a story is the linchpin of the “Lay’s Local” marketing campaign. The Lay’s marketers know that in this age of impersonal industrial food, we consumers want to develop relations with our “local” farmers so we can feel good about what we’re eating — in this case, Lay’s Potato Chips.

But the Lay’s campaign creates the relationship between us and their “local” potato farmers through deception.

In Part 3, I’ll talk about the deception behind the “Lay’s Local” ad campaign.

See also:

• The Truth about Frito-Lay’s “Lay’s Local” Marketing Campaign — Part 1
• The Truth about Frito-Lay’s “Lay’s Local” Marketing Campaign — Part 3
• The Truth about Frito-Lay’s “Lay’s Local Marketing Campaign — Part 4: Frito-Lay’s Dirty Little Secret
• “Lay’s Local” Update — They Just Don’t Seem to Get It

Tags: farmers markets, Lay's Local, Lay's Potato Chips, local food, locally grown, organic, potato chips

This entry was posted on Monday, June 22nd, 2009 at 7:53 am and is filed under PR & Marketing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.