If you were looking for a classroom case study in marketing 101, perfection? Except perhaps for the dude by the pool who might just be the genius behind the product.
Your are quite right in your assertions but the ad depts may have been thinking along the lines that the vegetables went through a sorting process at the farm before being sent to the factory hence “farm picked” as to size, weight, and similar machine or hand grading of product to ensure some consistency of product. I remember during my Ag Science days at Uni the beetroot in the Lockyer Valley was graded at the farm as the Processors would not accept them if they were outside specification hence perhaps Farm Picked. So not a lie, not an totally inappropriate use of wording but certainly can be easily misunderstood as to the “real” meaning by consumers and so is used to entice the consumer into a purchase based on a value the consumer places on a system of product production.
They aren’t interested in hooking the aware, they provide enough information that a purchaser if they read the packaging would know they weren’t “All Australian”, and they are usually “honest” in their marketing even if the words could have different meanings to others (not all are honest and why we have Choice and similar organisations). What they want to generate is an image the not so aware are convinced by, so that they then buy that product over someone else’s.
Gosh! We do the same thing on our farm - sort by size, quality, clean and pack - then dispatch to market.
I had another look at the packets - McCain are packed in New Zealand from NZ and imported ingredients. Other slogans - “real ingredients” (really? you mean the carrots are REAL?) “Picked for perfection … & snap frozen for freshness” “No artificial colours, flavours or preserves” Wow - kind of what I was expecting in a pack of frozen carrots.
I suppose with powdered vegetables and also vegetable supplements, one could argue that these aren’t ‘Farm Picked’ as they have no resemblance to the farm picked fresh vegetable in question.
I also wonder if many in the community don’t realise that almost all fresh vegetables (with exception of say hydroponically glasshouse grown salad greens/tomatoes) come from farms. Maybe while it seems the term farm fresh is a effectively a tautology for most, maybe there is a proportion that doesn’t have the same level of knowledge of the food industry as others?
I remember a decade or so ago that a survey was done (may have been in the US rather than Australia), that a significant proportion of the community didn’t realise milk came from cows and another survey where some thought chocolate milk came from special chocolate milk cows.
Here is a reference to that, other Americans’ beliefs about food sources, and something about the why that is. The Washingtonpost is now giving a number of free articles a month and then puts up a subscription wall, so if the link walls you go around it or wait for the new month.
