How did Tropicana lose $30M in a packaging redesign? | Hacker News Reader

How did Tropicana lose $30M in a packaging redesign?

bootcamp.uxdesign.cc

236 pointssimonebrunozzi266 comments

I looked at the title, opened the link, searched for “Peter Arnell,” got zero results, and knew the article was total garbage.

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/arnells-explanation-of-failed-t...

I had a close friend who worked on a project where they brought this guy in. Charged $1m a month and invoiced his jet fuel to the company, if I remember correctly. Now you know where the $30M actually went.

The article is an example of insufferably authoritative articles about “design thinking” combined with pseudo-science (the heat map image). You don’t need to know any of that, to know that Peter Arnell was an idiot and his design was utter junk.

But Indont think this is about "some guy came up with a crap design". It strikes me a number of things went badly

1. I think C-level execs at major corporations should have built up immunity against such bullshit.

2. The heatmap (plus the associated idea of lots of consumer testing) should have spotted something

3. the rollout seems to have been global and immediate, instead of for example testing the new packaging out in say tiny geographical markets first

All of this reeks of failing to have rock solid product management (and release mgmt) at its core. Maybe we will find out more, but in the end, the loss was manageable, sales recovered and maybe the company learnt its lessons - would be interesting to hear what process and people changes occurred the days after ?

C-level execs are the bullshit in these stories. They meddled with something that wasn’t broken and this was the result.

Logo Management is practically a cliche. Can't think what else to do to justify the big bucks? New Logo™!

So articles like these completely miss the point of the commercial design industry.

The goal isn't sales - never mind brand awareness. The goal is to make C-suite execs feel like they're doing something exciting, and maybe even a little creative.

From that POV I'm sure the Tropicana rebrand was a huge success.

And if a design fails, it's always the agency's fault.

As someone who has worked in product design for many years, the most important part of the job is making sure bad changes and ideas don't get pushed out. Yes, making sure they don't do anything is a crucial part of the job and I'm always very busy with that part of things, especially if it's something that comes down from the C-level.

I think the heatmap was done by the ones who did the article :)

> the rollout seems to have been global and immediate

According to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tropicana_Products#:~:text=tre..., it was "only" in the US (it was in 2009 btw); weird, I wouldn't have been surprised if the $30 million was already spent before they actually went into store shelves. It wouldn't have been "just" a packaging redesign, they would have to do a big marketing campaign (billboards, TV ads, etc) as well to make people aware the packaging had changed.

I believe you should have read the article. It discusses $30 million in lost sales due to the packaging redesign. It was not talking about the costs to do the redesign.

It is mentioned in the article though:

"But why did it fail? How does a $35 million rebranding project fail?"

“It” here is the title, which is not talking about the cost to implement the redesign, only the lost sales. That the cost to implement the redesign is mentioned in one sentence, within an article devoted to explaining why the redesign failed, does not keep the top-level comment from being misaimed. Its clear the commenter is responding to a mistaken belief about the topic of the article (which he says he didnt read).

Here's him talking about the design: https://youtu.be/WJ4yF4F74vc?t=29

This is fascinating in the worst possible way. Lot of fancy words alongside "the purity of the juice" when the ingredient list is full of weird things the average consumer has no idea about

I mean isn’t that the point? Most people still think OJ in a carton is squeezed from the orange in the tree itself or something.

It's one of those things that's obvious if you think about it, but still blew my mind when I read about orange juice being blended like wine with various oils, etc to ensure consistency throughout the year and across huge production scale.

Probably the subliminal advertising image of the straw straighy into an orange from childhood.

Listening to that verbal diarrhea, I had an unmistakable visceral reaction that George Carlin describes so well: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UecRfBJ2LBM

The article also praises the design of the new lid, which was - surprise - one of the most derided elements of the redesign in professional product design comminity. The idea was that you'd feel like squeezing an orange when opening the carton. In reality, you'd be squeezing that nipple to get to your OJ. Worked out as expected.

Sister comment links to a contemporary news report, saying that the cap was the only element to be kept when returning to the old carton.

https://youtu.be/WJ4yF4F74vc?t=29

It's not a nipple it's just an orange shaped cap, when they say squeezing an orange they don't mean squishing it they mean rotating half an orange on a juicer.

Think the rest of the design deserves derision but don't see anything wrong with the cap assuming it's grip-able.

Sometimes design professionals are more aligned with fashion than the customer.

Customers love little touches like that. Kids will grab the bottle and be delighted by it, etc.

You still need to know _why_ it was junk, or else you might end up buying snake oil from someone else.

Yes, but the article should have also mentioned that the new design was pushed through by an overconfident star designer, that's definitely part of the story.

Regarding the actual design, sure, a nice fresh-looking orange is more enticing than a glass of orange juice, but I didn't even recognize that big orange blob as orange juice in a glass from the picture in the article, and I doubt consumers in a supermarket (who usually only see one side of the carton) would have recognized it at a glance. So you have generic-looking sans serif text beside a generic-looking orange blob. Doesn't sound like a recipe for success...

If you want to see insufferable pseudo science Google "Pepsi gravitational field"

This article is massively over thinking it.

The problem is the lack of a the word TROPICANA written really big on the carton.

I doubt people ‘stopped relating to it’ because of the lack of straw. They just didn’t know it was Tropicana at a glance, figured it was sold out and bought something else.

I think the lack of an orange with a straw coming out probably *was* a huge part of the issue. Both boxes have Tropicana written really big on the carton, although one is slightly smaller and sideways.

A box with an orange with a straw looks like a Tropicana box, even if you can't read, and it's a visually engaging image.

The redesign looks like supermarket generic juice packaging, the orange with a straw is as distinctive as the Coca-Cola or Pepsi logo.

> The redesign looks like supermarket generic juice packaging

This is the number one issue. The writing is part of it but overall it just looks bland and not ‘fun tropical’.

Yep. Replace the prominent brand logo of a consumer product with something in a generic sans serif font (in a different orientation!) and people are going to think it's a generic alternative and skip straight past it, straw or no straw. There's no straw on the Tropicana in my fridge...

I mean, I imagine younger McDonalds customers feel far more emotional connection to the brand's clown than anyone does to a straw, but replacing Ronald with some "healthy eating" pictures isn't going to kill sales at a branch nearly as much as quietly replacing the golden arches with an "M" in Generic Gothic...

That's it, I mean it would already have less impact if they put "tropicana" horizontal and the biggest font size on it. Instead it was "100% juice", which is what you expect on a brandless, generic product.

People don't buy orange juice, they buy Tropicana. Likewise, they don't buy lemon & lime soda, they buy Sprite; they don't buy beer, they buy Budweiser or Heineken because you can't call those products "beer", and oh also the brands are well known I guess. We don't use search engines, we use Google; conversely, this is why Facebook's corporate rebranded to Meta, because they wanted to distance themselves from the social network.

When I lived in Scotland, Tropicana was the luxury juice option for the piss poor student I was.

And it definitely mattered that the label boldly proclaimed the name Tropicana, because that meant no need to read further in, just check if it was my preferred kind (no bits).

With the name missing, I'd probably end up not buying even if I had the funds specifically for it, because it would be easier to grab some juice from concentrate.

The human brain processes and identifies images much MUCH faster than text. The prototypical figure cited is 60,000x faster. I don't know the source for that figure, but it makes inherent sense that the human eye can visually identify the shape of a juicy edible fruit much faster than it can read an english word.

Also aside from the brand text size, the new box looks like a store brand style of graphic.

This is spot on.

I only buy orange juice when people visit. Last time that happened I was at the store looking for Tropicana, but couldn’t find it. After several scans of the shelves I finally saw it under the new label.

I never noticed the cap was an orange either.

This is why I love HN. I am the OP, and your comment made me realize what the article was missing.

We had a discussion on this in design school... our consensus which the heat map also supports is that Tropicana failed to realize the strength of their logo.

It's not the orange since after all Tropicana makes a lot of different juices. It's the logo. Writing it vertically in a different font destroyed brand recognition and consumers simply failed to find the product on shelves. This agrees with the articles suggestion that they genericized themselves.

yes. But it was $65 million. $35m for the idiotic design. and $30m in lost sales when it stopped people buying it.

Here's Arnell Group's explanation of their Pepsi Logo redesign:

https://www.goldennumber.net/wp-content/uploads/pepsi-arnell...

While I disagree about the heat map in the article being pseudoscience, I agree that Arnell's "design thinking" totally is.

This is an impressive level of bullshit. Like, this takes a degree and years of experience to bullshit at this calibre.

> [1 light year = 671 million miles per hour]

hmm

Architecture school. The dirty little secret of architecture is that it has no theoretical theory beyond jaw boning. (It can work, so don't rush to knock it.) So in architecture, a coherent narrative that can inform form making (like the light & gravity b.s. in OP) is the best you're gonna get. (The actual science based stuff is called Structural Engineering.)

It looks like they're trying to force an art into a science and it's just ridiculously off the mark. I wonder if agencies have to do this thing to have something more concrete to prove to clients even if it's bullshit and they know it.

Also, it's pretty impressive seeing the Pepsi branding just get progressively worse over the years. It's a little out there by today's standards, but I kind of like the 1898 branding the best.

>... "squeeze" maintains a certain level of I guess power when it comes to this notion emotionally about what squeeze means like my squeeze or give me a squeeze or the notion of a hug or the ideas behind the power of love and the idea of transferring that love or converting that attitude between mom and the kids, right?

I am, once again, convinced that the entire marketing field is an elaborate joke played on the rest of us.

I agree that the article would give more information if it gave the background information about the logo redesign, but that's not its topic; the topic is why the logo had problems, not how it originated.

> Now you know where the $30M actually went.

Do I? I have no idea how this loss figure is allocated between lost revenue, and wasted spending on the redesign itself. I'm supposed to believe your comment which insinuates that $30M went to some Arnell person, and nothing was actually lost, sales-wise.

What seems to be lost in these “redesigns” is the why: why are you doing it? If there isn’t a list of benefits long enough to justify the cost and possible risk, well, that’s a problem.

There’s also a tendency for companies to be super proud of what they’ve done so they neglect methods like A/B testing and instead just bet the farm on their great new design. After all, it cost a lot of money and looks cool to the decision-makers so what could go wrong? Um, maybe before you throw out all of your packaging everywhere and double-down, you could tone it down a little and try it out in a few small markets first? Then watch and see if sales are going up or down? Then think about going further?

And at this point there is also a tendency to ignore history. This is far from the first big failed redesign; what is going on that no one is looking at past failures (plenty of which have had high costs to other brands too), and imagining that there might be a downside?

I suspect the "why" is most simply explained by "because designers had to justify their salaries."

In my experience, the "why" is more often called by a manager, director, or VP who wants a big project under their belt. The amount of times a "major design change" has happened from the bottom-up is very, very, almost impossibly rare in most cases. Sad story, but a true story.

This is correct.

Management gets bored.

Source: Me, previously a Big Brand Marketing Manager

Not bored as much as "I need a big project to parlay into a VP/Executive role"

I worked on a website that was completely redesigned every few years. We, the developers, didn’t understand why until one of the business people, who was leaving for a new job, admitted to us that they (the business management team) mainly did it because it was fun, because it let them expense meetings/travel/food doing “research” and meeting with design consultants, because it gave them something to do other than their real (hard) job of getting 3rd parties to use the current website, because it gave them something to report to their managers, etc.

Preface: I think a lot of us - particularly developers - have a tendency to mock/devalue what people in design and UI/UX do.

I think there's incredible value in what they do and part of that is keeping sites from going stale. I believe that in general people get fatigue from seeing the same design day-in, day-out. There's a cost to not changing. Or at least a trade-off.

The risk is when redesign is carte blanche for the design team to do things that they think are pretty without the requisite user testing and data to back up decisions.

Major design changes should come with a nice set of data to support them.

I think that fatigue of seeing the same design is real. But I also think that for the most part, company employees, executives are the only people who see the sites frequently enough for it to be a problem.

For a lot of websites I visit frequently what I want is ease of use and familiarity. Redesigns are often a bother since I need to learn to navigate the new site.

For sites I don't visit as often I likely won't really notice a redesign.

As a counterpoint, Facebook got criticism for each redesign but if they kept their 2001 aesthetic it would look and feel incredibly dated now.

I haven't had a Facebook account for many years now, but I remember that what bothered me about their redesigns wasn't how they changed visuals to keep up to date. It was a rapid series of restructurings which meant you always felt you didn't know where to find things.

Craig's List looks dated, but remains incredibly functional and is still the top site in its segment. Its dated look doesn't scare people away. It is still very functional. That's the important part.

Yet Craigslist appears to be steadily losing traffic each and every year since 2017, so I’m not sure it’s the best example.

Meanwhile Facebook marketplace is nipping at their feet while they are staying static.

Clearly Craigslist is incredibly profitable and successful, and possibly more profitable in the short term because they aren’t investing, but IMO remaining static means you lose ground eventually.

It depends on what you view a website as.

- a tool?

- a marketing piece?

Redesign for the sake of it is usually bad for the former. It's fine (good?) for the latter.

This is the right answer.

Major redesigns to marketing pieces (aka, advertisements) are fine. No one spends a long time staring at them anyway.

Major redesigns to tools will annoy the hell out of their users, unless things are done very carefully indeed (or the old tool was indisputably awful). You've got to look at how novices onboard to and use them, how intermediate users use them, how experts use them, and, if you can find one, how a master uses the tool. (The master will probably do something that surprises you. Make sure your redesign does not piss the master off, unless you like firefighting.) That's a lot of work!

Unfortunately, most things in life are tools by this definition, or at least close enough to them.

I’ve absolutely sat in RFP processes where a product is discounted because it ‘feels old and legacy’, so you are absolutely right that there is value in the emotional feel of a product.

There is definitely a perception that if the front end of the product is old and hasn’t had a refresh, that it’s probably the same with the rest of the product and it’s sitting in maintenance mode.

For some maybe.

But a lot of non techy users get confused very quickly. My family members, and not just older ones, are constantly having problems with app's changing things around, smart smart TV moving things around, apps changing icons etc.

I am usually their first call and I can tell you, that a lot redesigns, even when they are clearly better designs, leave a lot of users confused.

And it annoys me because not only are they usually annoyed when they call, but somehow its my problem. There is a reason why I am on backend. I don't like dealing with users.

Not that different from some rewriting, refactoring or moving to $TECHNOLOGY I saw in the last 20 years of my career. Probably minus the travel/food...err no, I forget the mandatory conferences to understand better the new tech and know how other companies use it!

It's similar to how some development choices are made too. Examples: Rewriting the system in a new language, change a framework or create your own from scratch.

I have fallen into that trap myself. I have read about some exciting new tech in a blog and want to try it out in a POC. There may be some excitement around it and suddenly it becomes a MVP and placed into production. Eventually it evolves into "legacy code" that developers hate to touch. The right approach is sometimes to step back, and rewrite the POC in a language/framework that can be supported by others.

As the rebrand was outsourced (like most rebrands) the "why" is absolutely not so designers can justify their salaries.

Design as a department is very often under resourced and I'd take a strong wager that the designers who actually work for Tropicana were dreading all the unnecessary work this rebrand was surely going to generate for them.

This is always used as an excuse but it ignores that rebrands like this rarely come from in-house designers. Execs will contact an outside design firm and ask for a rebrand, spend obscene amounts of money (relative to the size of the company) and then hand the design to the in-house designers to execute on it and turn the mock ups into actual usable assets.

I am absolutely certain that this explains the changes to the iOS Safari changes. Someone justified their existence in Apple by moving the close button in the mini fixed tabs display from the left—the side it’s displayed on the tabs themselves—to the right.

Yup. The "Why?" question gets lost among the impulse to be 'clean and modern'.

>>Tropicana’s original packaging had rich colours and a strong visual hierarchy. On the other hand, the new packaging failed to impress the consumers, with clean lines, a lack of visuals, transforming the once indistinguishable orange juice into a “generic store brand” product.

This same thing happens in everything else too, such as automotive controls and web design.

The damn "designers" are so infatuated with their "principles" of design and aesthetics that they completely ignore the fact that DESIGN IS SECONDARY TO FUNCTION — if you make it stop working, your design sucks, no matter how good you think it looks.

Whether you make it harder to notice the brand that I've always associated with good fruit juice, harder to find the controls to my automobile by touch while the windshield is fogging with blinding glare of oncoming cars, or just harder to find a common function on your web page/app, IDGAF how aesthetically pleasing, clean, or hip your "design is" — you had one job and you FAILED.

How designers and their teachers and managers can so consistently and massively fail to understand that fundamental concept is just baffling.

I wonder if some of the "why" isn't the general turn against straws in the current zeitgeist.

The article indicates the re-design in question was "launched" in January 2008. This is the date where planning the redesign began.

Another article [1] indicates that the new design was deployed on January 8th, 2009, and Tropicana announced a return to the old design on February 23rd, 2009.

A quick search shows an article [2] indicating around 2018 was when the panic around plastic straws began (with, for example, Seattle banning plastic straws starting in July 2018).

So in this case, the plastic straw issue does necessarily appear to be related to the redesign.

1: https://www.thebrandingjournal.com/2015/05/what-to-learn-fro...

2: https://www.eater.com/2018/7/12/17555880/plastic-straws-envi...

Well that shows how well I read the original article. Thanks for the correction.

Whoops: I missed a "not" in the last sentence. Should be:

> So in this case, the plastic straw issue does _not_ necessarily appear to be related to the redesign.

> The damn "designers" are so infatuated with their "principles" of design and aesthetics

I agree with your main point, but I have a small objection to this phrase. I don't think principles of design tells you to not care about usability/function. In fact, a good design is aesthetics AND function, as argued in "The Design of Everyday Things"[1].

So in this case, the designers are simply not doing their job. They've been infatuated with their principles of aesthetics, that they didn't follow the actual principles of design. Which happens when designers blindly copy the latest trend.

The reason I'm bringing this up is that one might interpret the phrase to mean that design is not about function, which isn't fair to many great designers out there.

[1]: https://www.amazon.co.jp/-/en/Don-Norman/dp/0465050654

Agree, I should have specified "aesthetic principles" (vs "'principles' of design and aesthetics").

Yes, the actual great designers put function first, then solve the now-harder problem of simplifying the aesthetics without sacrificing the function.

Had an architect (trained, licensed, etc.) propose a redesigned front porch and put a support post right square in front of an existing bay window. Sure, from the front elevation view, it looked great, but squarely blocked the view from inside. Also proposed just building the wrap=around part without moving a natgas meter, just left it obstructing part of the side entry. What a waste of time and money - she just solved the problems she wanted to solve (e.g., make it look good in her drawing) and ignored all the other problems - and was proud of that.

This is the problem - real design is hard because it includes ALL the problems and the constraints they create. Too many (I'd say most, in my experience), just focus on the problems they want to solve, ignore the rest, and think they've done a good job, when in fact they completely failed. And the real problem is management that accepts that crap as completed work and pushes it out on the customers.

> The damn "designers" are so infatuated with their "principles" of design and aesthetics that they completely ignore the fact that DESIGN IS SECONDARY TO FUNCTION — if you make it stop working, your design sucks, no matter how good you think it looks.

The original package was created by designers too. It worked, and then, many years later, a second group of designers responded to a new set of requirements with another design, which did not. This is how it goes. Failure is a possibility when you try something new. It's not like there's a foolproof system that works every time, and if you experience a setback it's because you forgot to apply the foolproof system.

On the engineering side, applications and services break all the time. I don't generally a consider it a failure of engineering as a discipline when that happens. Failures can even be caused by mistakes, but that doesn't mean the people involved are stupid or lazy or careless. It's the risk of moving quickly in a complicated world with many overlapping systems. Design and marketing are not spared from this unfortunate truth.

The "why" was pretty clearly explained in TFA:

> One of the main reasons for rebranding/redesigning is for brands to reconnect with existing consumers and reach out to new ones.

The notable point here IMO is not "why did they do it?" but "how/why did it fail so badly?"

That would have been the fallacy of unjustifiably arguing from the general to the specific. What you have stated are arguments why a company might choose to rebrand. They are not arguments that Tropicana should have done it, and not when it did.

My guess is that the marketing people drank too deeply of their own Kool-Aid, so to speak.

"reconnect with existing consumers and reach out to new ones" is management consultant bullshit like "leverage our synergies to enhance the client experience". It means nothing. TFA did not explain anything.

You also don't "reconnect with existing customers" by changing the brand.

"the brand" is ill-defined. Is it the name "Tropicana" or is it the design of the packaging? In this case, it turned out to be the latter more than the former. There are other cases where the name is retained through a total redesign without this sort of damage.

While I half-agree on the BS level in that quote, in another sense I think it's totally obvious what they meant: consumers who already buy tropicana become inured to the brand identity - a redesign gets them actively thinking about the choice to buy tropicana while shopping; consumers who do not buy tropicana for some vague, non-specific reason may be tempted to try it after the redesign, either because they merely notice the package more, or find it more appealing.

> In this case, it turned out to be the latter more than the former.

That conclusion is not obvious. On the new packaging, the brand is much less visible, all one sees is a big promise about "orange" (like Agent Orange?) so it could be that people were looking for the brand name, and took that opportunity to switch.

The piece suffered from not having nearly enough detail here. Why did they choose that exact moment? What led them to choose the new design no one liked?

I would imagine the fruit juice industry is under some pressure. When I was a kid their product was viewed as a staple breakfast item that was beneficial to your health. These days its reputation is more like soda, too sugary for regular consumption.

Were they really redesigning for vague brand marketing reasons or were they grasping at straws to revive declining sales?

Well sometimes "why" is just to stay current. When I was a kid I thought those dated-looking boxes of "JIFFY" cake mix were actually boxes that nobody had bought and had been sitting there for 30 years.

I mean, as risky and brand and logo redesigns are, there is often a need to want to modernize or revitalize your logo or mark or packaging. It’s more difficult, the larger/older/more iconic your packaging is. That’s why the best logo and branding and packaging redesigns tend to either be the most iterative or have changed early in a product/brand’s lifecycle before he could be too associated with a company.

The Tropicana redesign was a total failure — but there is a story where you could have had a redesign that left essential elements (the orange with the straw at the center), with a slightly updated/modernized logo or typeface, and it could have been successful.

Successful rebrands and redesigns don’t get the same attention as the failures because they are successful. But there are a number that are fairly radical — Airbnb, I was definitely in the camp that hated their new logo and branding at first, but it has worked. Coca-Cola consistently has some of the best adjustments to its logo and packaging, subtle but powerful (New Coke being the exception that absolutely proves the rule). Apple and Microsoft have both had very good redesigns — Apple has used the same logo shape for decades, but it has changed font and color of the logo. Kroger is a more recent example of an exemplary rebrand.

Going too far, and in this case, making your core packaging impossible for buyers to recognize is absolutely a problem and a disaster — but rebranding or updating branding is often a very good thing for a business, especially when it is subtle enough for the consumer to not notice or to just notice that it now looks more elegant or fresher.

One of my favorite graphics is this one detailing the evolution of the Pepsi logo vs. the Coca-Cola logo: https://flowingdata.com/2009/08/13/pepsi-and-coca-cola-logo-...

Of course it was over-dramatized for effect, and the truth emerges further down the page. But it's close enough to true that it stops and makes you think.

Yes!! I mentioned this meme in another comment because it is also one of my favorites!

Coca-Cola has some of the best branding work of all time. It’s also interesting to see how iconic the branding is even in non-English countries. You can see a Coke logo in any country and know what the product is. It’s just superb.

One of those brands has endured for over 125 years, is today worth over $18 billion dollars, and is the 36th-most valuable company in the world.

The other is Coca-Cola.

Pepsi gets an absolutely undeserved amount of shit[1]. It's one of the most successful companies in the world. It's impressive on every single metric other than "is Coca-Cola." The fact that they can have that level of success while competing head-to-head with one of the most successful brands of all-time ought to be reason for accolades, not insults.

The takeaway that I choose to get from that graphic is that there are multiple paths to success, and one need not imitate the market-leader's strategy.

[1] Except that one logo document. It absolutely deserved all the shit it got for that one.

I'm not sure AirBnB is a good example. Their brand is their name. They aren't a product on a shelf. I'm not sure there is a logo terrible enough to make someone close their website and not book a room.

Well, I think you run the risk of not making the app icon (if there is an app) or logo recognition worse. When Uber changed its logo to the weird map pickup thing from the “U” — it hurt them. That’s not a 1:1, obviously because Uber is much more homescreen reliant than Airbnb is, but that doesn’t mean too can’t have bad internet logo redesigns. To say nothing of terrible website redesigns, which have killed companies before (Digg v4).

Again, I’ve come around on the Airbnb one personally. I think it works now.

Point taken. I forget people use apps sometimes. I do everything through the browser.

To sort of riff off what you're saying; there might be some serious social, "whys" driving the more material, "why" of lackluster brand re-designs in the last 20 years. It seems like as companies are bought up by private equity groups (PAI Partners in Tropicana's case) quality and brand identity suffer. You really see this all over the place and another bad recession could reshuffle the board enough to let private wealth groups buy up what's left of the United States' viable domestic cultural export.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PAI_Partners

> What seems to be lost in these “redesigns” is the why: why are you doing it? If there isn’t a list of benefits long enough to justify the cost and possible risk, well, that’s a problem.

Exactly. Unless your brand is in trouble or you are trying to deflect the attention from some sort of scandal the odds of losing existing customers from a successful business is far higher than the odds of attracting new customers because you have changed your packaging.

You can't (and shouldn't) A/B a redesign.

There is much more than "this one is better than the other one" (to some random passer-bys)

> why are you doing it?

Because people need more salary/bonuses/consulting fees/resume fodder and will constantly push for it, making up various bullshit to justify it. Sometimes it goes through and a redesign project is started, and once started, it's very hard to turn back while saving face.

I think a lot of times a redesign is simply used as a tool for a manager/exec to have an impact, any impact really. It does not matter so much if the net result is positive or negative. It looks good on their resume. "Joined company X and spearheading redesign project of X". Designer companies love it, they can let their imagination run wild and the managers will gobble up whatever they come up with.

This happens on all levels really. If it is a huge company like Pepsi or Tropicana or for example my high school which "rebranded" and all the students including me had to stamp thousands and thousands of exam paper with the new logo.

If I were the hiring manager, the first question I'd asked is, what were the results of that redesign?

> What seems to be lost in these “redesigns” is the why: why are you doing it? If there isn’t a list of benefits long enough to justify the cost and possible risk, well, that’s a problem.

I ask that to myself every single time I update my mac or pixel 3 phone.

The UX gets worse and worse every year, and just when you finally start to get used to it they decide to change things again.

I guess they need to keep internal teams busy 24/7. I've seen it in many companies, people keep throwing A/B tests, see what seem to improve the experience by negligible amount (most of the time their tests are skewed anyways so it doesn't really matter), then they spent millions and hundreds of man hours to move a few buttons and make a few lines of text bigger/smaller. When they deploy it the impact is either inexistent or negative, people get fired, new managers get hired, and they start again.

>What seems to be lost in these “redesigns” is the why: why are you doing it? If there isn’t a list of benefits long enough to justify the cost and possible risk, well, that’s a problem

If you have a painter on staff shit will get painted. If there's not a lot of shit that really needs painting some shit that doesn't need painting will get painted.

If you keep graphic designers (or better yet, someone who's managing a group of designers) on staff...

It is my theory, backed up by nothing but instinct and my own very fallible personal experience, that many customers simply did not “see“ the new design. That is, they would have preferred to buy Tropicana but assumed it had disappeared from the shelves.

I think you're spot on. The older design shouts out "TROPICANA"; it's bad enough they removed the iconic orange from the new design, but you have to tilt your head 90 degrees to even read the logo.

I'm inclined to agree. The article's talk about "resonating" with the audience is wishy-washy, and seems far-fetched for accounting for a 20% decrease in sales.

On the other hand, a UX design tenet is to test, not assume. Just because it sounds right doesn't mean it's the correct explanation (that goes for both TFA and alternative theories).

Well, they did. It’s just that the test cost $30 million!

It actually happened to me, actually more than once on drastically changed designs. I buy the same thing I had at home, because I like it, and why change things that work?

At the store, I don't see it. I may notice that product with the same name, but the spell is broken, it is no longer the product I mindlessly buy again and again, and it may be a good occasion to try something else. Even worse, I may end up buying competing products that look more like the original design than the new design of the same brand.

I've seen some brands where they changed the design, but they have a plan to retrain people. There will be a callback to the old design on part of the packaging, or they use the old packaging but change the name, but on the top corner write 'same great taste as whatever the old name was'. Maybe they wait a few months or even years to confirm that sales didn't fall before they can fully shed the old branding.

>Even worse, I may end up buying competing products that look more like the original design than the new design of the same brand.

I wonder what the legal implications would be of copying a product's old abandoned design? Especially if the original was to revert back?

Yeah.

The article has all this stuff about emotional attachment, blah blah blah.

Really, orange juice is kinda hit and miss, so I prefer to stick with a particular brand (Tropicana). The redesign is

1) totally unrecognizable

2) pretty generic looking

It is literally just hard to spot next to the other juices.

I agree with all of this. Re#2 it’s even worse than pretty generic. It looks like a generic/unbranded OJ, and for some reason it looks like a low quality OJ to boot.

I’m guessing it’s a picture of their actual juice, but it looks very bland, especially compared to the bright ORANGE color of… an actual orange (or at least, of an over saturated orange).

Yeah the problem is simply loyal customers not being able to find the product. Supermarket shopping is a continuous game of Where's Wally, especially if you shop in a different one to your regular. Don't make that game harder.

I think most importantly it's that sideways text is harder to process at a glance than what we're used to. So, it ends up becoming a design element rather than text. And the orange/straw icon is also, in some ways, a pictograph for recognition.

The orange with the straw was pretty good branding, pretty unique while being straight to the point.

They also had that ad in the 90's.

https://youtu.be/wUVp3zyqo3s

On top of that, a major redesign of your package implies a major change in your product. Not everyone is keen of change.

Yes, I have lost, literally lost things I liked to buy at the grocery, due to changed packaging.

One time I had to Google images for a 20 minutes to find old images, then write down the brand/ type.

Another, the package changed, and the new package stated some strange "new" ingredient, which left me struggling to know if the flavour changed.

I honestly would just prefer a package never changes for my entire life.

Edit: also, I don't want my favourite food to be "new and improved!". Leave it alone!

If you're not aware, "New and improved" generally means the product was changed to reduce ingredient costs. So hopefully I've ruined the "meaning" for you.

Yes, but not reduce my angst.

What I feel like can happen with these changes is they'd probably push this as "See how much money we've saved by using these ingredients instead and the change in taste is barely noticeable!". Then they'll go through this process 10 times in the span of years and you'd end up with something that taste completely different than the original.

Likewise. My wife once sent me to the store to buy Cheerios and Honey Crisp Apples. I grabbed the Cheerios, then, still on the cereal isle, I looked everywhere for thr Honey Crisp Apples - before I realized the Apples were apples in the produce department

I don't understand your comment about the apples, why wouldn't apples be in the produce department?

His brain cross connects with honey bunches of oats and still thought he was looking for cereel I guess?

"Honey Crisp Apples" sounds like a cereal, presumably.

I think Apple Honey Crisp was a cereal at one point...

And the Honey Crisp apple is very new. Even though released in the 1990s, it takes decades for production to grow, and, for other regions to get cultivars and start selling them too.

Then on top of all that, for most people to even know about new apple flavours, it must compete for space at the grocery...

There has to be like 20-30 types of apples now. I can't keep track.

Don’t worry. The correct answer is always Fuji. FTFY

How is that relevant?

I am surprised by how the redesign looks like a lot of store brand versions.

Thank you! Exactly my thought. The first thought on seeing the new design was Safeway Essentials or some shit.

Yeah, honestly, I think there are several brands I buy in grocery stores for which I don't know, or at least don't remember, the brand name. I just recognize the packaging and think "oh yeah, that's the one I like".

I'm relieved this is the second-to-the-top parent comment.

They literally did an eye gaze study showing that just about no one saw the logo (and even fewer read it), yet their conclusion is some emotional fugazi.

Yes - if I'm interpreting that rapidly-changing GIF correctly, where previously people were drawn to the brand name now their eyes focused on "100% Orange" ... which completely commoditizes the contents.

"I couldn't find the stuff we normally get, so I bought this one because it was cheaper".

Yeah, scanning a shelf, I would assume that the redesigned package was one of those internal brands with very generic package design.

This was absolutely my impression too. "One is Tropicana, the other is the slightly upscale store brand."

It's not made very clear in the article, but the eye tracking study was not done by Tropicana, but after-the-fact by an eye tracking company.

Yup. The redesign looks like any number of grocery store "house" brands, which are typically awful.

100%. The design is also just completely shit. There’s nothing wrong with it in terms of it being more “modern” and “minimal” it’s just designed by someone who isn’t at remotely good at graphic design and overseen by people who are similarly clueless. I’m sure the designers were able to ask the right questions to get the responses they wanted from their focus groups. The blind leading the blind

The design is also just completely shit.

We should be careful with strong words, but in this case they may be appropriate.

The eye-tracking heat map GIF in this article supports this too. Before everyone saw the logo, after they didn't. My first thought when I saw the new one was that it looks like an own-brand product, that heatmap probably explains why.

IMHO the biggest visible difference to me (besides the "straw orange" trademark) is the original one has the brand Tropicana very clearly in the middle, while the redesign puts it in much-less-readable-at-a-glance vertical text on the side. To someone quickly scanning the shelves, the former stands out and immediately tells you it's Tropicana, while the latter would probably tell you only "100% orange" --- fine, it's orange juice, but doesn't say the brand as prominently.

Personally I noticed the brand change but found the new branding so lame that my lizard brain suspected the quality had also gone down. It just wasn't Tropicana anymore.

There is no Tropicana in my country, but the design and branding looks like what I'd expect from a supermarket's own brand.

Yeah it feels like a very no-name brand, where you could apply the same design to many different kind of products.

Yes, this is in the eye tracking heatmap gif at the beginning of the article.

The new version 100% looks like a generic to me. It’s some kind of orange juice. Likely a store brand.

I agree that lacking the obvious name Tropicana somewhere is a big problem. Maybe if that was still in black and just as prominent as it was on the old carton, the new picture of orange juice might’ve worked.

But if you make your product look like the store brand… what do you expect?

> IMHO the biggest visible difference to me (besides the "straw orange" trademark) is the original one has the brand Tropicana very clearly in the middle, while the redesign puts it in much-less-readable-at-a-glance vertical text on the side.

Yes, that was also the Humble Opinion of the eye-tracking visualization included in the article.

The article totally misses the point of why the rebrand failed.

I used to drink Tropicana Grovestand all the time in the 2000s. One day, I showed up at the grocery store, and a bunch of people were in front of the Tropicana rack, looking confused.

I tried to find "Grovestand," but I couldn't. There were tons of identical bottles to choose from. Eventually, after staring at the bottles for a few minutes, I saw tiny text at the top of the bottle, hidden under the angle from the shelf above. It said things like, "no pulp," "pulpy," "lots of pulp."

I had no idea which one was "Grovestand."

Now, when it comes to orange juice, I really only like "Grovestand," so I took the time to shake the bottles around and figure out that "pulpy" was "Grovestand" and that "with pulp" wasn't. But, if there was another brand that I liked, you bet I would have bought it instead.

All they needed to do was keep the old brand names, and make the words visible. That's it. Even though I was relieved when they went back to the old packaging, I was disappointed. All I wanted them to do was make it easy to find "Grovestand."

The article reads to me that this is the point they were getting at.

> Tropicana’s orange juice became generic

They genericized something which was uniquely branded. To some people it's the orange and straw, to others it's Grovestand, etc.

And to me, this is brain-dead obvious. They completely removed everything that was visually distinct about the packaging and replaced it with blandness.

Seems like you had a particular reaction to the branding change, but that doesn't mean their explanation for the wider public reaction is wrong.

The new design doesn’t mention the pulp level and that’s one of the main things I’m thinking about when trying to pick out an OJ. So when you pair that with a redesign, it’s unclear to me what’s in the carton.

Yeah, exactly. I'm scanning for no pulp, calcium, and vitamin D.

Yup, I steer clear of calcium enhanced OJ, because it ruins its flavor.

I thought I was crazy for suspecting that. I stopped buying the calcium version but spouse didn’t believe me.

It's chalky, which I suppose is what you'd expect by adding calcium, but I don't want chalky orange juice.

So, a redesign that looks better to the designer and sacrifices critical functionality.

Web users: "Welcome to our world."

I’m not sure about the redesign, but Tropicana (and others) have used color to denote this trait. Blue, instead of orange, is low pulp+calcium.

For some reason the image used there doesn't show it but you can see what they had in mind here [1], still could be clearer.

[1]: https://www.thebrandingjournal.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/0...

This article looks like an odd repackaging (wink) of the original:

https://medium.com/loceye/how-we-predicted-tropicanas-big-fa...

...Which is also maybe a bit tenuous, given that they just had people do eye tracking on renders of the packaging, and the two cartons are angled differently. Does that translate into real world eye attention?

That is linked from the main article and is itself a bit of an ad for their eye-tracking software with some dubious claims. But it did send me down a rabbit hole over the agency that did the package design. The design came from Arnell Group headed by Peter Arnell. Arnell was retained to rebrand both Tropicana and Pepsi (same parent corp) and the produced the infamous logo redesign deck that circulated back in 2008: https://www.reddit.com/r/Design/comments/hspqgd/pepsi_logo_r...

My guess is that Pepsi didn't know what they were doing, hired an agency who came on really strong with a ton of bravado about how their instincts trump research and got sold a pile of magic beans.

My favorite quote from Arnell around that logo:

> "When I design things, I design in a pure vacuum. When I did the Pepsi logo, I told Pepsi that I wanted to go to Asia, to China and Japan, for a month and tuck myself away and just design it and study it and create it," he said. "There was a lot of research, a lot of consumer data points ... and dialogue that I had with the folks at Pepsi, consumers and retailers. We knew what we were doing."

There was a lot of data. But I also design in a vacuum. But I talked to consumers.

https://web.archive.org/web/20090121113422/http://adage.com/...

edit: also, how could I forget the Lemon Demon song! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EAG7pye0V1g

And the current pepsi logo and branding is straight up garbage.

If it was bad enough to go viral maybe it was actually a marketing success.

Carton design, or not, I don't buy orange juice anymore because I don't know what "Made from Real Oranges*" means anymore. Over time, I came to learn that straightforward claims like these are engineered to deceive. Tropicana could use 100% real oranges, and I still wouldn't believe them.

I could inspect the ingredients, and even then, it's dubious- companies have found ways to circumvent the rules there too. Instead of all this mental gymnastics I have to do at the grocery store, I just decided to abandon the product completely.

I would be suspicious of any orange juice where the company feels the need to stipulate "real orange juice". What the heck else would it be made of?

Reminds me of "ice cream" which, in a lot of cases, is not. Mixed in the ice cream section next to identical looking cartons of different flavors Breuer's is a big culprit) are things that say "whipped dairy dessert" in the place that others say "ice cream".

One common-ish case would be from concentrate, since ostensibly it is just the water removed and then re added. However, you're at that point substituting the natural water for whatever is at the bottling source.

This does lead me to an interesting question, that being whether one could make orange juice from frozen concentrate that is 'better' than store bought and reconstituted at a factory

I wonder if the same health equivalency applies to jam and it’s analogues. There’s double-fruit jam that doesn’t identify as jam, but as a fruit spread.

It seems like a healthier choice, due to higher bulk of fruit purée versus standard jam on toast (which I assume has more sugar).

There are surprisingly strict rules about ice cream terminology pertaining to ingredient ratios. Is it ice cream? Ice milk? Custard? Etc. An ice cream-like product that is not actually "ice cream" is not necessarily inferior.

With orange juice... not sure. There's long been the distinction between "from concentrate" and "not from concentrate", but both were still considered actual orange.

I imagine this was in response to a mid to late 20th century processed foods culture where things like tang and sunny d were widespread. Lots of “Orange Drink” I remember in the wire Frank sobotka talked about all the Tang he drank because it’s “what the astronauts drank”.

Ah, yes. I remember my mom brought home Tang one time from the supermarket. We love our mom, but to use the phrase parents use with their kids, we told her "we are very disappointed in you. We expect you to make better choices".

> What the heck else would it be made of?

In my country, there are also concentrated 'orange squash' drinks which have some real fruit, and also some flavouring and sweeteners.

They taste different to pure orange juice, they're substantially cheaper and they have very low sugar/calorie content.

Sounds like the Americans' "Sunny Delight", a childhood staple but also kind of.. not quite juice.

At least some products can not legally be called something they're not, like "sandwich slices" or "singles" instead of "cheese".

Tang, Sunny D, and Kool-aid basically ruined the entire juice industry by popularizing adding artificial flavor and coloring to sugar water. IMO they shouldn't even be allowed to show images of fruit in their packaging/marketing, shouldn't be able to market to kids, and they should have a surgeon general's warning about obesity akin to cigarette packaging and cancer.

I've accidentally bought what I thought was fruit juice more than one time, and learned my lesson about reading the label. Many people might not ever bother.

>I would be suspicious of any orange juice where the company feels the need to stipulate "real orange juice". What the heck else would it be made of?

You're right to be suspicious; most juices are not just "freshly squeezed" from a fruit - they're processed.

Part of the "process" is to actually extract the sweetest part of the juice and leave the rest behind (so way more sugary than "natural") and some will actually contain some other forms of filler (like non-orange based oils).

It's a lot like McNuggets or Subway chicken sandwiches - they're made "from real chicken" but with all of added the salt and fillers, you end up wondering exactly how much of it is actual chicken.

One of the best way to evaluate "real juice" is by how long it'll last before it expires (either shelf life or after opening) - more than a few days will indicate there's extra preservatives, etc. in it.

Juice in general just seems terribly unhealthy in 2022. I enjoy it as a treat now and again but think of it more like a dessert rather than a part of my daily breakfast routine.

Non-ironically, the only time I drink Tropicana, or any fruit juice anymore is when I buy it at McDonald's

It's just one of those weird things that people, especially Americans, have been conditioned to think is wholesome.

After some time not drinking it, orange juice is almost sickeningly sweet to me.

traditionally yeah (my dad has orange juice every morning) but I don't think it's seen that way anymore for younger generations for most people

It seemed terribly unhealthy back in 2012 too. You get all the sugar and none of the fiber. But many people have this weird idea about "natural" being healthy or that being derived from something healthy means it's still healthy. If we called them processed or refined fruit drinks, I'd bet you'd find people become averse to fruit juice.

yeah I was thinking more like 1982

I went through a phase where I was buying oranges and preparing fresh juice everyday at home. About a month or so into it, I bought packaged juice - it tasted like crap. My brain had gotten used to the real stuff and the difference was night and day. Eventually my laziness got better of me and I got tired of buying and carrying loads of oranges but that experience completely turned me off from packaged juice.

> I don't buy orange juice anymore because I don't know what "Made from Real Oranges*" means anymore.

Don't be silly --- it means you are buying juice from oranges that has been stripped of all flavor, stored in tankers for a year or two, and then reconstituted by adding "flavor packs" built by recombining the chemicals found in different oranges. Pretending this isn't clear to consumers is just anti-progress.

Along those lines, the book "Squeezed" is pretty good, and details the argument of the Tropicana lawyers who actually make this argument. Here's a New Yorker article about it: https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/ask-an-academic-....

I'm not sure if you're being sarcastic, but I really don't think this is "clear to consumers".

They're definitely being sarcastic

SRSLY?

;-)

I'm being sarcastic that it is "clear", and being genuine when I say that orange juice industry lawyers argue that consumers are not confused about what "Not From Concentrate" means despite such contortions.

I do highly recommend Hamilton's Squeezed book for a more detailed expose. It's available from libraries, both physical and online. It's not for everyone, but if you care a lot about food regulation and the way that producers get around the law to deceive consumers, it's great.

I don't know the product at all, but given the phrase "no pulp" on the packaging I'm sure it's from concentrate; mass produced orange juice, reduced and put into these 1000 liter pallet containers and shipped from who knows where, then rehydrated and packaged.

I mean we have our apple juice like that; it's cheap and a crowd pleaser, but it's not the same as fresh juice.

Economies of scale though. I wouldn't be surprised if concentrate is 100x as efficient in transport than the equivalent in juice oranges would be.

On the plus side, increasing awareness of the problem has made it more common to see actual fresh orange juice squeezed onsite at stores. And it's delicious.

I recall when this happened as I was actively redesigning the entire branding for a nationwide packaged food company at the time (15 different products for about $200k - a deal for them and a deal for me and my crew of two). The Tropicana blunder was a great object lesson in why too many cooks in the kitchen will ruin the soup. It's a textbook case of a corporation's marketing department's tendency to shy away from any type of bold graphic for fear of being the person blamed if it fails.

The lesson is that failure is guaranteed if you approach a brand design with fear of failure, or fear people won't "get it". If there's one thing meme culture has shown, it's that people are desperate to be talked to like adults who are in on the message. Assuming your customers can't appreciate a metaphor because they're consumer robots is a guaranteed way to lose customers. Assuming they'll get your sense of humor or aesthetics is, of course, a big risk, but that's the job.

As far as my role at that time, it worked out well, but the brand really did need a redesign. They were the second largest prepackaged sushi and salad company in the US and their packaging looked like airplane food before. I went in the complete opposite direction, filling each label with layered visual cues and references to what was inside. Sure, I was terrified it wouldn't work. But if Tropicana had approached me at that time and asked me for a redesign, I think I might have told them they didn't need one. Or I would've advocated for keeping their core "joke" because it worked. No one had the guts to tell them to stick with the brand.

A lot of things I don't buy super often, I just remember the packaging or color and not the brand name. In this case, I'd remember the orange with the straw and a green logo, maybe. In fact, before opening the article, I knew about the OJ with that image, but no idea it was Tropicana.

So if I liked that brand, and went in and couldn't find that image, I'd probably just pick something at random.

This is a little bit of a tangent, but I've always thought that it was funny that orange juice is overwhelmingly sold in liquid form, not as frozen concentrate. You can buy concentrate here in the US, but it's much less common (and, IME, fewer and fewer grocery stores stock it.) Given that most liquid orange just is just reconstituted concentrate anyways, buying the liquid form means paying for the shipping and space cost of the water.

Also interesting that elsewhere liquid concentrate is also popular. Which has the same benefits as frozen but with less of the hassle. Sometimes called Squash[0].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Squash_(drink)

I got into the mango orange juice, and it got really hard to find.. which led me to frozen and there’s no going back! There are so many more options, and a lot more options without added sugars and corn syrup being added to the mix.

In case you were avoiding added sugars and corn syrup due to nutritional concerns, I have heard doctors for over a decade come to the conclusion that fruit juice is as bad as soda due to the total sugar content. You would not eat 10 oranges, but you can easily drink 10 oranges worth of sugar in a few gulps.

One of the questions pediatricians ask nowadays is do you keep fruit juice in the house, and I believe they ask so that they can advise you to get rid of it or prevent the kids from drinking it.

> buying the liquid form means paying for the shipping and space cost of the water.

Buying frozen solid means cleaning up your mixer. I also bet it's easier to lose some fiber.

Either way, the taste isn't the same as freshly made juice.

I'm from Brazil and loved tangerine/mandarin juice since when I was a kid. Now I've moved to the Netherlands and love it even more. How come, you may ask? In Brazil, we usually find tangerine pulps. Here, I buy fresh tangerine in the supermarket. Sure thing, it takes much longer to squeeze them and clean things up... but the taste is 5 times better.

> Buying frozen solid means cleaning up your mixer. I also bet it's easier to lose some fiber.

Maybe I'm doing it wrong, but I've always just put the concentrate brick (cylinder?) into a pitcher, filled it up with the right amount of water, and mixed it until fully melted. It's no worse to clean up than anything else in a pitcher would be.

I agree completely about fresh-squeezed juices, by the way. I do my own juices directly when I have time! But the point was about American consumers, who are buying reconstituted concentrate anyways (just that someone's done the reconstituting for them.)

US has "not from concentrate" juice. That's the primary reason people buy Tropicana instead of store brand.

I think most Tropicana in the US is from concentrate. "Pure Premium" is their sub-brand for NFC (not-from-concentrate) at the moment; they've previously called it "Tropicana Natural" but were sued since even NFC orange juice requires significant processing to make it last more than a few days.

(Which goes to the other point: most store brand orange juice comes from your local Dole, Minute Maid, or Tropicana distribution center, which is bottling/filling the cartons from concentrate. It's all the same supply chain, the only thing that's different is the brand tax.)

Edit: Weakened the claim about how much is from concentrate, because I'm having trouble finding a statistic.

Second edit: I'm wrong, the majority of orange juice sold in the US is NFC. So this is a market distinction I wasn't aware of.

> the only thing that's different is the brand tax

They have different flavor bombs.

Same as branded gas that all comes from the same regional depot with vendor specific additives dumped in the trailer before delivery.

>he point was about American consumers, who are buying reconstituted concentrate anyways (just that someone's done the reconstituting for them

They aren't. Over 90% of orange juice sold in the US is not from concentrate.

not from concentrate does not mean it isnt reconstituted. its just that instead of removing the water to preserve it they remove the oxygen. deaeration removes more flavor than dehydration, so they must be put back in. thats why tropicana tastes more like orange juice than orange juice

I keep reading this here but this is forbidden by law in France (as they call it "100% pur jus"). They could add vitamin C if they wanted but they don't seem to, given the nutritional data.

Is Tropicana juice different in the US and in the EU?

Not wrong at all, this is a great idea (as long as it mixes well).

I've resorted to something similar when making my tangerine juice: I put some water, ice, and a sugar cane "square" in the jar or cups first, and then go to squeeze the juice. By the time I'm over making lunch or dinner, the juice is ready without having to use a spoon to mix it.

Around here, concentrate + water costs as much the dilute, or even more, so why bother?

>Given that most liquid orange just is just reconstituted concentrate anyways, buying the liquid form means paying for the shipping and space cost of the water.

You're incorrect. The "fresh" non-concentrated market is a lot bigger than the concentrate market in the US, at least. Has been since the 80's. It's more than a 10:1 ratio, actually.

Do you have a source for that? Not that I don't believe you; it's just surprising. My understanding was that orange juice ships poorly, even among fruit juices, which is why the concentrate market was still large.

Edit: I found a survey from 2009[1] where non-reconstituted orange juice was over 50% of the market. So I'm completely wrong about this!

[1]: https://crec.ifas.ufl.edu/media/crecifasufledu/extension/ext...

"Not from concentrate" juice is still pasteurised and stored in tanks for months or years before being packaged into the final supermarket packaging, with vitamins, minerals and flavourings added to revive it. It's not any healthier than concentrate, but it is more expensive to store and transport as the water isn't removed.

I guess that explains how they get around the spoliation. Thanks for the explanation.

The problem is that to store orange juice "fresh, never concentrated" you have to take all the oxygen out, this makes the juice taste like... well nothing. so then they have to put the flavor back in.

It makes me wonder if the frozen concentrate is actually closer to the original orange than the "fresh never concentrated" stuff?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orange_juice

Recently my wife found some Bubble Tape in the store. We were kind of taken aback by how horrible the modern packaging was.

- https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/61pGZX8pXLL._SX679_PIbun...

The entire "Bubble Tape" text is in an illegible font under a giant Hubba Bubba logo, as if kids have some sort of Hubba Bubba brand loyalty they're trying to play on. I assure you they don't.

- https://www.mashed.com/img/gallery/the-untold-truth-of-bubbl...

Compare to the old packaging. It was clean, fun, and to the point of the fun that waited inside for the kid.

It's as if the modern redesigners didn't realize they're marketing to children.

From the article:

> One of the main reasons for rebranding/redesigning is for brands to reconnect with existing consumers and reach out to new ones.

Which is horse shit. The reason companies do a rebranding is because the people that get paid to design things convinced the people that pay for the design that it was a good idea.

The problem is that the people that pay started being convinced by justifications like "reconnect with existing consumers" rather than "it will make you more money".

See also: if it ain't broke, don't fix it.

It's no accident that popular brand redesigns are usually just fresh coats of paint on their existing visual identity.

Apple: lost the rainbow, same silhouette

Google: still multicolored wordmark, but in a more modern font

BMW: same silhouette, reduced color palette

UPS: same colors and composition, simplified shapes

Brands are worth money they engender loyalty: people become repeat customers from brands they trust. If they don't recognize your brand, why would they choose it?

Yes, continuous brand refinement keeps thing modern without breaking the connection to the consumer.

For reference, here were some of the Arnell Group's other designs:

Logos: https://web.archive.org/web/20130714003408/http://arnell.com...

Packaging: https://web.archive.org/web/20130717162849/http://arnell.com...

Food and Beverage: https://web.archive.org/web/20130717185242/http://arnell.com...

This redesign really would wreak havoc on the muscle memory of "grab for the orange circle with red-and-white-spiral coming out of it"

Poorly written article. Says exactly the opposite of what it means several times. Here’s the totally wrong conclusion, for example:

“On the other hand, the new packaging failed to impress the consumers, with clean lines, a lack of visuals, transforming the once indistinguishable orange juice into a “generic store brand” product.”

The orange juice used to be distinguishable, not indistinguishable!

It’s very hard to read articles that are so poorly written that they say the opposite of what they mean and rely on the reader to suss out their actual intent.

Gosh, I remember this so well (it was 2009, not 2008, as this article states), rarely has a new logo/packaging change had such an impact on a product (Gap’s aborted logo redesign in late 2010 is probably still the ultimate example. That one lasted less than a week before reverting.).

A better retrospective I think, is here [1], but it failed for all the reasons people in the comments have said. When you’re talking about consumer packaged goods, it is important to remain recognizable, especially on a store shelf. Getting rid of the iconic orange with a straw and replacing it with something that was very late-2000s Swiss type minimalist was just the wrong move. And an expensive mistake.

Not Pepsi’s first or last logo/packaging mistake (there is a great meme that shows all the iterations of the Pepsi logo/can design over the years and then like one Coca-Cola design that has basically been consistent since the 1890s or something that isn’t technically accurate, but it true enough in the abstract), but probably one of its more costly, especially since it didn’t include a formulation change.

[1]: https://www.thebrandingjournal.com/2015/05/what-to-learn-fro...