American potato lobby seeks desperately to understand millennials

First, a disclosure: potatoes are, without a doubt, my favorite food. If I had to be stranded on a desert island with one food, it would be potatoes for a set of reasons friends have heard me enumerate far too many times.

But my potato enthusiasm is not, alas, enough to support an entire industry. And the U.S. Potato Board has embarked on a quest to make sure my fellow millennials enjoy potatoes just as much as I do.

The USPB’s mission is singular: encourage Americans to eat more potatoes. To that end, it has embarked, like just about every other American industry, on a quest to better understand the relationship between millennials and their product. The project is called “Understanding Potatoes: How Do They Fit Into Millennials’ Lives?” Here is what they have learned.

The report has some informative albeit difficult to read charts about what millennials value in potatoes. Millennials don’t think potatoes are exotic or indulgent. Millennials do think potatoes are cheap. Millennials, it seems, think the same things about potatoes that everyone else in this country does.

The potato board thinks there are five types of millennials, each of which can be represented by a type of potato.

The upshot of the different categories seems to be: some millennials like to try new things. Other millennials don’t. Some cook for fun! Some just cook to put food on the table. “Not all millennials,” as the first graph reminds us, “think or act the same.”

Anyway, the Potato Board’s plan is this: go after the entertainers and explorers, populations that skew towards Northeastern parts of the country, and convince them that potatoes are hip. You’ve been warned, youths of Northeast corridor: big potato is coming for you.