Kraft Is Packaging Salad Dressing as Salad 'Frosting' So Kids Will Eat It

Campaigns hinging on tongue-in-cheek "deceptions" are suddenly all the rage. 

Last week, IHOP asked us to believe that its hamburgers are really pancakes. Now, Kraft Heinz and Leo Burnett suggest a sneaky approach for parents who can't get their kids to eat vegetables. Why not pour Kraft Classic Ranch Dressing all over their salads, carrots and broccoli, but tell them it's … frosting.

To drive the falsehood home, the food giant has produced limited-edition tubes of the condiment in tubes disguised as "Kraft Salad Frosting."

Watch this krafty clip for more details:

"The idea came from realizing parents' white lies were common ground and something that was already being shared on their social media channels," says Sergio Eleuterio, the brand's chief marketer. "But it also generated some conversation around it being right or not. 

"Within Leo Burnett and Kraft's team, we shared many examples of our own—calling broccoli 'little tree tops,' or spinach 'dinosaur food,' [or saying] 'the ice cream truck only plays music when it is out of ice cream'—and quickly found that in fact those lies were good for kids. We decided we should act on it and give parents a hand in upping their lying game with something that may actually help their kids to eat their veggies." 

Wait … all those years back, the truck still had creamsicles? Mommy, you LIED!

Anyhoo, Kraft invites folks to share their favorite parental fibs on Twitter via #LieLikeAParent and #contest for a chance to win one of 1,500 "Salad Frosting" samples. 

Obviously, the initiative's all in fun—and leverages the fact that many moms and dads already deceive their kids, at least in small ways, when they believe it does more good than harm. Kraft says 63 percent of U.S. parents tell "instrumental lies" to persuade youngsters to clean their plates, citing a study published in the International Journal of Psychology. 

Fair enough, but given the current churn over alternative facts and fake news, does the marketer worry about blowback? 

Eleuterio says Kraft respects everyone's point of view on the subject, but maintains that if parents use "white lies" to help relieve their own stress and improve their kids' diets, "we want to be able to help the best way we can."
  
There's no plan to sell the disguised ranch dressing in stores or online, we're told. Then again, Kraft clearly likes to lie—so who knows?

CREDITS

Kraft Heinz
Lie Like a Parent Credits

Leo Burnett
CCO: Britt Nolan
CSO: Emma Montgomery
ECD, Creative Director: Jordan Doucette
Creative Director, Art: Ryan Stotts
Creative Director, Copy: Pete Lefevbre
Copywriter: Adam Bedol
Art Director: Kai Foo
Account Director: Megan Collins
Strategist: Efrain Bahena 
Senior Producer: Britt Godsell
Production Designer: Marissa Stewart

Starcom
Media Associate Director, Maddie Watkins