Taking the Nestea Plunge is different than it used to be. For years, the brand based its RTD market presence on its “Cool” line – a sweet mixture that contained more high-fructose corn syrup than actual tea – but don’t look for it today. Coca-Cola recently took the product off the shelves and replaced it with something sleeker and decidedly more tea-like.
The new Nestea comes with cleaner tea flavor and a 50 percent boost in antioxidants, but the brand’s image has changed just as much as its formula. Nestea traded an evil-looking (and sometimes skeletal) snowman mascot for straight-walled bottles and clean labels that focus the customer’s attention on tea leaves.
That move came about after the company did research that found that Nestea had fallen behind changing trends in the RTD tea category.
“Our perception as innovative and modern had started to slip,” said associate brand manager Carl Henrickson.
Nestea’s not alone. The brand’s straight-walled bottles and high-end, natural, whole leaf ingredients is only the most recent rebranding and reset at the top of the $1.5 billion (and growing) RTD tea sector that’s pumping cash into the hands of beverage companies and clever retailers alike. The segment has nearly doubled in the last three years. Consumers found a new interest in lower calorie and healthier beverages and tea has become a pop-culture touch-stone. Those shifting trends first benefitted cutting edge startups like Honest Tea and Sweet Leaf, who used high end ingredients and an upscale fell to push their products out the door in ever-growing volumes. Coca-Cola currently owns a stake in Honest, but acquisitions can only carry a company so far, and the big tea brands – Nestea, AriZona, Snapple and Lipton – have all seen fit to re-jigger themselves in the face of a changing market.
The brands have approached that re-jiggering with different timetables, and from different angles. Nestea stuck Cool so deep in cold storage that they removed any reference to the product from nesteacool.com, but Lipton preserved Brisk – their Cool equivalent – selling it alongside a premium, glass packaged line. Snapple also launched a parallel, premium tea brand to accompany their sugar-laden core product, and AriZona…. Well, they’re playing their next step close to the vest.
The New York-based independent had the luxury of being ahead of the rest of the pack – way ahead. As the brand that picked up on the iced-tea excitement Snapple created in the early 1990s, AriZona broke ground by bringing green tea to mainstream American consumers in 1996, and planted their flag on a hill that it would take other major tea brands a decade to notice.
Since then, the company has added more variants on green, black, white and herbal teas, as well as a handful of sodas, flavored waters, energy drinks and smoothies. As a result, the brand hasn’t had to hit the reset button to fit the current market trends. In fact, according to company spokeswoman Leigh Parrinello AriZona hasn’t really changed its methods. Ever.
“I think that we just do our own thing. They love what they do here… They’re still passionate about it.” Parrinello said.
Despite that persistent passion, the company appears to be poised to take some kind of new angle on the tea category this fall.
AriZona hasn’t released a new RTD tea product since January 2007, when the company added a single mixture of black and white tea in a 24 oz. can, and Parrinello said the company plans to launch new lines in September. How many, or what they might be, the company’s not saying, but their web site entices customers to be ready for “Bold new flavors [and] surprising packaging innovations.”
Some of those “bold new flavors” might not be so new. A side effect of the company being so far ahead of the tea category is that not all AriZona products found a receptive consumer when they released it. The RX line of herbal teas, for example, included five functional flavors when it hit the market in 2000 – long before vitaminwater caught fire with American consumers. The line survived, but only after the company dropped three flavors that consumers might be more interested in today. Similarly, Arizona launched a short-lived red tea in 2004 – something that may be better suited for the market now.