The Food Porn Index: How Healthy Is The Food We Instagram?

Bolthouse Farms is a farm company with headquarters in California that sells a line of bottled juices while being one of the United States' leading sellers of carrots. They're also behind one of our favorite marketing campaigns in recent memory: The Food Porn Index.

Musing that "we all love to post pics of #FoodPorn on the Internet, but fruits & veggies often don't make the cut," Bolthouse Farms has created a custom algorithm to continuously track how many times food hashtags of certain items are used on Twitter and Instagram. Take a minute here and think back to the past few times you checked out food pictures shared on social media. Chances are that there were no carrots or fresh berries involved. Bacon, Cronuts, experimental restaurant dishes? Yeah, that's more like it. Bolthouse Farms backs up their claims statistically, noting that over 70% of pictures that are characterized as "food porn" fall in the "unhealthy" category.

Related: Meanwhile, In The Vast, Exotic World Of Charcuterie Instagrams

The site displays a grid of 24 boxes, featuring 12 healthy items and 12 unhealthy items. Clicking on each box takes the user to a different interactive activity (the hypnotic donut screensaver is a personal favorite). It's an interesting marketing campaign from a company that has always sought to bring the "fun" back to eating healthily. Will the public react positively to an increased amount of awareness for healthy eating on social media? It's certainly a question worth monitoring.

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