The Packer
A man sits on his couch, his face glistening with sweat. On the couch, to his left, a live lobster sits.
The man hits a button on a remote control, and nearly 10 fans of different types — desk fans, oscillating fans, a ceiling fan, even a box fan — turn on and blast the couch with cool air.
The man sets down the remote and picks up a glass of iced tea. As he looks over at the lobster, the all-caps word “CHILL” appears overhead in white.
It’s a commercial. The screen goes light blue, but CHILL is still there with the rest of its sentence: “CHILL RAW AND PREPARED FOODS PROMPTLY.”
The last screen shows the logos of the U.S. Department of Agriculture, Health and Human Services, and the Ad Council.
It’s one of the four public service advertisements the agencies created to promote food safety awareness. The commercials’ respective messages are chill, clean, separate, and cook.
The information is conventional: The ads promote the prompt chilling of raw and prepared foods, cleaning knives and surfaces when dealing with raw food, separating raw meat from produce and using separate cutting boards, and reaching proper heat levels and the use of thermometers for cooking raw food.
The advertisements are anything but conventional.
“They’re kind of crazy, but it certainly makes people sit up and take notice,” said Ray Gilmer, vice president of communications for United Fresh Produce Association, Washington, D.C.
Gilmer was on a panel representing the food industry that discussed the advertisements with the agencies.
He said the theme of the talks was compromise.
“I think the experts wanted a fairly literal message, about exactly what consumers were supposed to do,” he said. The agencies “took that in mind, but they also didn’t want to make a boring commercial.”
In the commercial focusing on cross contamination, a woman stands in a living room between two chairs in opposing corners. Her arms are crossed as she polices the room. A live chicken stands on one chair, and a bunch of carrots is in the other.
As the chicken jumps down to the floor, the woman sternly points it back to its chair.
“It’s more memorable than showing a chef separating meats and veggies on a kitchen counter,” Gilmer said. “There was a balance between literal education and making it a memorable, creative campaign.”
While all the commercials feature a goofy and playful portrayal of the safety guidelines, they end with a simple sentence taking over the screen for a few seconds, getting to the serious advice at hand.
Gilmer noted the guidelines deal more with meat safety and less with produce. Regarding whether the ads were too goofy, he said he couldn’t speak for the fresh produce industry as a whole, but “anything that gets in front of consumers and reminds them” about ways to keep food safer is good.
He also likes that the ads focused on the consumer, because the majority of food contamination occurs in the home.
The ads are available on the USDA Food Safety YouTube channel.
