• USA Today, Tuesday, May 12, 2009 10:30 AM

Frito-Lay will unveil today a marketing campaign that focuses on 80 "local" farmers from 27 states who grow the potatoes that are used to make its chips, Bruce Horovitz reports. And consumers who type in their ZIP codes and the first three digits of the product code on a bag of chips into the Chip Tracker widget at Lays.com will be able to see the location of the plant where their chips were produced.

"Lay's Local" will be the brand's biggest 2009 campaign, says Dave Skena, vp of potato chip marketing at Frito-Lay. It also features 40,000 in-store displays customized for each state. Ads and regional store displays use such phrases as, "locally made in Texas."

A survey of chefs by the National Restaurant Association found "locally grown" food to be the hottest industry trend for 2009, but Frito-Lay does not directly make that claim. Dawn Brighid, marketing manager at the green group Sustainable Table, says Frito-Lay is trying to fool consumers. "Most of their products are obviously grown on industrial farms," she says.

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