The encyclopedia · Marketing & Brand · Marketing decision · 2009
Tropicana ditched its iconic orange for a new look — sales fell 20% in two months
The 2009 redesign by the Arnell Group replaced the orange-with-a-straw with a plain glass of juice. Shoppers couldn't find it; Tropicana reverted in weeks.
PepsiCo · Tropicana · 2009-02
What happened
In February 2009, Tropicana — then a PepsiCo brand and the top-selling orange juice in the US — replaced the packaging on all its US cartons. The new design, created by the Arnell Group, swapped the long-running image of an orange pierced by a drinking straw for a plain stemmed glass of juice, redesigned the cap to look like an orange's skin, and turned the brand name sideways. The goal was to modernize a tired look.
Customers revolted almost immediately. Shoppers who had grabbed the orange-with-a-straw carton for years could no longer recognize the product on the shelf; many assumed it was a generic or a different brand. Within two months, sales had fallen about 20% — an estimated $30 million-plus in lost revenue — a stunning collapse for a billion-dollar brand driven entirely by a packaging change.
PepsiCo reversed course fast, restoring the original orange-with-a-straw design within weeks of the relaunch. The episode became one of the most cited cautionary tales in branding: a redesign that looked cleaner to designers was illegible to the people actually buying the product, because the thing they changed was the very cue customers used to find it.
Why it happened
- The redesign removed the single visual anchor (the orange-with-a-straw) customers used to locate the product, treating it as decoration rather than functional recognition data.
- The new pack looked like every other generic juice carton, so the brand disappeared on a crowded shelf.
- The change was validated for aesthetics, not for the split-second shelf-recognition task that actually drives a low-involvement purchase.
- A billion-dollar brand's identity was overhauled without appreciating how much of its sales depended on visual habit.
The lesson
Your packaging's most recognizable element is functional data, not decoration. If shoppers find you by one visual anchor, removing it breaks the purchase — test for shelf recognition, not aesthetics.
Aftermath
Tropicana reverted to its original packaging within weeks, and the Arnell redesign became a textbook case in marketing courses on the difference between refreshing a brand and destroying the cues that make it findable. The lesson — that packaging recognition is functional, not cosmetic — is now a standard warning in rebranding playbooks, cited alongside other packaging and logo misfires.
Sources
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