Tropicana's 2009 Rebrand: The Carton That Lost the Straw

Why Tropicana Redesigned the Carton

In 2009, Tropicana Pure Premium led the refrigerated orange juice aisle, and it belonged to PepsiCo. It was also getting more expensive. PepsiCo's annual report for 2008 says its North American juice volume fell by a mid-single-digit rate that year "as a result of previous price increases," and it names price increases on Tropicana Pure Premium as one reason the division's revenue grew.

On January 8, 2009, Tropicana announced what it called a "historic integrated marketing and advertising campaign." The ads, built around the line "Squeeze, It's a Natural," started on January 7 in New York and Chicago. The cartons changed too. Tropicana said the goal was to "rejuvenate the category" and remind shoppers the juice is squeezed from fresh oranges.

The release called the new design "sleek and simple." The main image became "a glass filled with orange juice," a "100% Orange" graphic went on every carton, and a new cap was "shaped like a half-orange." The orange with a straw in it, Tropicana's symbol for years, was gone. Peter Arnell's agency, Arnell, designed both the carton and the campaign. Tropicana's president, Neil Campbell, said it would spend more than $35 million on the ads.

Why it was risky: the carton is what regular buyers look for in the aisle. Redesigning the category leader's carton changes that cue for all of them on the same day, and Tropicana was doing it while its prices were rising and its juice volume was already falling.

What the Tropicana Rebrand Did to Sales

Shoppers complained in letters, emails and phone calls. According to The New York Times, some called the new carton "ugly" or "stupid" and said it looked like "a generic bargain brand" or "a store brand." Others said it was harder to tell Tropicana's varieties apart, or to tell Tropicana from other orange juices.

On Monday, February 23, 2009, Tropicana said the old carton and the orange with the straw would be back within about a month. Campbell said the complaints came from "a fraction of a percent of the people who buy the product," but from some of "our most loyal consumers." The ads kept running. The orange-shaped caps were saved for Trop50, a lower-sugar juice drink due in stores in March.

Five weeks later, Ad Age published store scan data from the research firm IRI for January 1 to February 22, roughly the weeks the new carton was on shelves.

• −20%Tropicana Pure Premium unit sales, January 1 to February 22, 2009, while the category's unit sales were flat · IRI via Ad Age
• −$33MPure Premium retail dollar sales over the same weeks, down 19% to $137 million. That's money at the register, not profit · IRI via Ad Age
• <2 mo.How long the new carton was on the market before Tropicana said it would go · Ad Age

Rivals gained in the same weeks. Ad Age reported double-digit unit increases for varieties of Minute Maid, Florida's Natural and Tree Ripe, and store brands grew too. Pure Premium still had about a third of the category's sales through February 22. A Tropicana spokeswoman answered Ad Age by email: "No dots to connect here."

The Slide Started Before the Carton

Tropicana's reply has some support. A study by Jonq-Ying Lee, an economist at the Florida Department of Citrus, used Nielsen grocery data for every Tropicana orange juice, not only Pure Premium. In all four weeks of December 2008, before the new carton, Tropicana's gallon sales were already 12% to 23% below the same weeks a year earlier.

The slump was already under way, and the carton seems to have made it worse. Lee's model takes out price, store promotions and the time of year, and it still finds Tropicana demand dropping after mid-January and staying down until early May, while Florida's Natural, other brands and store brands picked up. Total orange juice sales held up, which points to buyers switching brands. Tropicana's dollar share hadn't recovered by May 9, 2009, after a buy-one-get-one deal at Publix in April.

Read the numbers with care. The 20% is Pure Premium in IRI data; the weekly chart is all Tropicana orange juice in Nielsen data, so the two don't match exactly. The $33 million is lost retail sales in under eight weeks, not a loss on PepsiCo's books. The $35 million often quoted as the cost of the redesign was the ad budget. Campbell wouldn't say what switching back cost, only that it "isn't significant." PepsiCo's first-quarter 10-Q doesn't name Tropicana at all; it puts most of a 14% drop in North American non-carbonated drink volume on Gatorade.

Where Tropicana Is Now

PepsiCo sold Tropicana, Naked and other juice brands to the private equity firm PAI Partners in early 2022, for about $3.5 billion in cash plus a 39% stake in the new company, Tropicana Brands Group. PepsiCo then wrote that stake down: $321 million in 2023, and $498 million in 2024 on what it called its "remaining investment," citing "worsening operating losses and liquidity position." That happened more than a decade after the carton, and nothing in these sources ties the two together.