Candy, chips and soda are widely available and aggressively (and punchily) marketed. Can doing the same with fruits and veggies change consumers’ eating habits?

Some companies and producers are betting they can. Carrot farmers are now advertising packaged baby carrots with the slogan, “Eat ‘em like junk food.” A Halloween promotion for the temporarily renamed “Scarrots” includes single-serving packages and “25 temporary glow-in-the-dark tattoos of masquerading baby carrot characters.

As we’ve written, San Francisco is mulling restrictions on the fast-food meals that include toy giveaways including a requirement to include fruits and vegetables. (A vote on that has been delayed until next month.)

The latest frontier, as the WSJ reports today, is the vending machine, that bastion of snacking convenience. Fresh Del Monte Produce and a vending-machine maker, the Wittern Group, collaborated on a machine specially engineered to dispense fresh-cut fruits and veggies — even easily bruised bananas.

The new machine has two temperature zones to optimally preserve both fresh-cut produce and bananas. And there’s a padded lining and angled walls to prevent bruising. The next iteration of the machine will include a “fruit elevator” to carefully deliver the products, the paper says.

So, will it work? We’ve got a long way to go. Recently released CDC stats show that among adults, only 32.5% are eating the recommended two or more fruit servings per day and 26.3% the recommended three or more servings of vegetables. The government’s Healthy People 2010 goal was for 75% of Americans aged two and up to meet the fruit recommendation and 50% to meet the one for veggies.

The new vending machine hinges on the notion that we pick chips over apples because the chips are more readily available. But as one vending machine exec tells the WSJ, an attempt to stock one company’s machines with more healthful fare “went over like a turd in a punchbowl.” Just because people say they want it doesn’t mean they really do, he says.

Will kids be drawn to carrots marketed like Doritos? One study found that kids reported they preferred carrots (as well as graham crackers and gummy fruit snacks) in packages emblazoned with Dora the Explorer, Shrek and Scooby Doo to those in plain packages. But in contrast to the crackers and gummy snacks, kids didn’t report that the carrots in the cartoon-endorsed packages tasted any better.