Digital CPG Blog

Lay’s is offering a taste of farm life with its mobile greenhouse tour, which aims to offer a peek at the “rural farm experience,” reports BrandFreak.

The campaign is an effort to spotlight real, local farmers and is an extension of the ad campaign that launched last year featuring the farmers that grow potatoes for Lay’s. Once inside the bus, visitors can meet Lay’s potato farmers and learn about the chip-making process.

“At the end of each visit (the tour includes six cities altogether), Lay’s will donate the mobile farm’s contents to nearby community gardens, to encourage the planting of fruits and vegetables in metropolitan areas. The initiative taps into the localvore craze and offers a less taxing way to get in touch with your food sources than actually visiting a farm,” BrandFreak reported.

From the photo, it looks like Lay’s is setting up shop in Target store parking lots in some areas. In New York, Lay’s rolled into Times Square and not without some dissention. “When Frito-Lay wheeled its new promotion for Lay’s potato chips — a 70-foot long, 10-foot wide traveling greenhouse — into the crowded urban chaos of Times Square today, it became the latest large food company to awkwardly attempt to exploit a food trend that has largely left them out in the cold — the local food movement,” argued Melanie Warner of BNET.

Although I suspect most locavores will see right through this effort, it’s interesting that Lay’s is making the effort to tap into this important trend.