Douglas McGray’s How Carrots Became The New Junk Food is not about carrots. I mean it is, a little bit. But it’s mostly about product positioning and marketing.

“Everyone else pitched baby carrots as an antidote to junk food,” [Jeff] Dunn says. “Where [ad agency Crispin Porter + Bogusky] came out was almost the exact opposite. We want to be junk food.”

They realized that junk food is desirable. So instead of pitting carrots against that industry, they decided to play to its strengths instead. And it worked:

Crispin imagined individual snack packs made of opaque, crinkly plastic, like a potato-chip bag, with bold, junk-food-style graphics (the new packaging would cost about 25% more than traditional veggie bags, but Dunn could justify it as a marketing expense). “People are now grabbing a bag of these, you know, eating them in the car,” Dunn’s marketing chief, Bryan Reese, says. They’d look right at home by a convenience-store checkout.