By Martín Caballero In the later 1950s, residents of New York City looking out at the city’s ports could often find the familiar sight of the S.S. Tropicana, an 413-foot, 8,000-ton steamship that made a weekly trip up the Atlantic coast from its loading point in Port Canaveral, Florida filled with precious cargo: stainless steel tanks holding a total of 1.5 million gallons of fresh-squeezed orange juice. Until water transport was eventually scrapped for rail shipping in 1962, partly in an effort to reach the burgeoning Midwest market, Tropicana’s flagship steamer served as a life-sized representation of both Americans’ insatiable thirst for the citrus juice and of the engineering and logistical feats required by the fruit company to fill that demand. Fast forward to 2021 and that ship metaphor takes on a wholly different meaning. Despite reporting sales growth in 2020, Tropicana had been resembling a rusty, dated cruiser for much of the past decade, as a variety of practical challenges, from distribution issues to encroaching competition from non-juice brands, combined with the anti-sugar movement to create a perfect storm of disruption for the category. The Florida-based company isn’t the only one feeling the squeeze: over the last 12 months, two other legacy brands — PepsiCo’s Naked and Coca-Cola’s Odwalla — have been either sold or divested completely, while Suja, once considered an integral piece of Coke’s strategy to pivot away from soda and into more natural categories, was acquired by private equity firm Paine Schwartz Partners in July. Though names like Bolthouse Farms (itself sliced off from Campbells back to private equity a few years ago) and Evolution Fresh still remain, many of the of the breakthrough category brands from the past decade — Daily Greens, BluePrint, Juice Served Here — are either gone or barely pulsing.
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With major brands in transition, challenges and opportunities abound Yet if Tropicana and the like have been decommissioned, a new generation of juice brands are charting their own course through the market with considerably more nimble vehicles. Rather than simply chasing the cooler space left behind from the departure of heavyweight category names, this group is seeking to redevelop the juice space from a different perspective by leaning into functional ingredients and use-specific products, embracing innovative packaging formats and
