Baby carrot

The baby carrot is a root vegetable, usually orange in colour, with a crisp texture when fresh. The term baby carrot is commonly applied to either miniature carrots harvested before their roots develop or adult carrots chopped into smaller pieces. Ever since the late 1980s, baby carrots or mini-carrots have been a popular ready-to-eat snack food available in many supermarkets. The carrot gets its characteristic orange colour from carotene, which on consumption by humans is metabolised into vitamin A.

Baby carrots are grown to the "baby stage", which is to say long before the root reaches its mature size. These immature roots are preferred by some people out of the belief that they are superior either in texture, nutrition or taste. They are also sometimes harvested simply as the result of crop thinning, but are also grown to this size as a specialty crop.