Back when it was owned by PepsiCo in 2009, juice icon Tropicana committed a faux pas with a packaging carton redesign. It backfired, consumers revolted, sales dropped, and the affair became a fundamental case study in how not to handle a packaging design switch.
The company quickly put the genie back in the proverbial bottle, got back into familiar packaging within two months, then went back to the drawing board. The good news was that by 2011, the brand recovered with a well-thought-out, custom, 59-oz multi-serve carafe-shaped clear PET bottle with hefty, premium cap. Lots of focus group-testing was done to arrive at the carafe, and it paid off. Leaving less expensive cartons behind for clear PET, the new bottle reconstituted Tropicana in consumers' minds as a premium product in the category. Over the past decade-plus, the curvy savior of a bottle had grown into an icon of its own, so the ship was fully righted by the time PepsiCo sold Tropicana to private equity in 2021.
