Балаларға арналған тоң тағамдар: Kid Cuisine брендінің тарихы мен маркетингтік стратегиясы

Brand of frozen meals

Kid Cuisine is a brand of packaged frozen meals created in 1990 and is marketed by Conagra Foods. Described as a "frozen food version of a Happy Meal", the product is marketed towards children, while assuring parents of nutritional benefits. The mascot of the brand is a penguin named K. C. (short for "Kid Cuisine"),

Kid Cuisine is what its own marketing agency in the 2000s described as a "kid driven request item", that is, children would ask their parents to buy these items. Kid Cuisine relies on advertising with TV and movie characters, including The Avengers, Frozen, and SpongeBob SquarePants; the company also had a "Hello Kitty" chicken nugget dinner.

The foods sold under the brand often have what Bettina Elias Siegel, author of Kid Food, called "nutritionally questionable combos", including "cheeseburgers or mac and cheese served with corn and gummy candy, chicken nuggets served with French fries and pudding", inter alia. By 2010, such foods were increasingly questioned as the obesity epidemic took center stage, and Conagra developed a new marketing technique to keep convincing mothers to buy these products for their children. With the slogan "The more you know, the less you 'no'", they attempted to convince mothers that Kid Cuisine did actually provide nutritional foods that mothers would not have to say "no" to. But "good reasons" to say "yes" were, according to Siegel, very weak, and included assurances about some of the meals containing minerals and vitamins, and "minor nutritional tweaks" like using whole grain flour for the breading of chicken nuggets. In addition, the brand changed its mascots, ran an ad campaign aimed directly at children, which included games where children could sign up and win prizes. 20,000 children signed up online in 17 days, and many came back again and again to play branded games. The dual strategy that, according to Siegel, is at work here, targets parents and children: parents' "nutritional vigilance" is eroded, while children are encouraged to demand "unhealthy" products.