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Tropicana’s new bottling facility almost complete

Bradenton Herald – _July 13, 2011

BRADENTON — Tropicana’s new $4 million bottling facility is nearing completion and consumers are already seeing the result: new clear plastic bottles in the grocery store.

Tropicana’s Pure Premium brand of orange juice is now offered in bottles instead of cartons, a move the company believes is a consumer pleaser and sales generator.

“We are always trying to make decisions from the distribution standpoint that makes the most sense,” said Mike Haycock, vice president of manufacturing and warehousing for Tropicana.

Extensive consumer testing, along with results from a switch to plastic bottling for its Trop 50 product last year, convinced Tropicana executives to make the switch.

“We’ve learned that consumers like to see the product they are using,” Haycock said. “We’ve been very excited about consumers’ reaction to the product — it’s all gone well.”

The new bottle is known as PET packaging, or polyethylene terephthalate, which is widely used for packaging in the drink industry. Industry experts say PET is the most adaptive and widely used plastic packaging material because of its clarity, shatter resistance, mouldability, recyclability and cost-effectiveness.

“Consumers like it, they’re used to it, the bottles don’t break and it has a well-established record for getting recycled,” said Patrick Reynolds, editor and vice president of Packaging World, a trade publication. “Visibility is always desirable these days with consumers.”

Haycock believes the move away from cartons continues to be a good one for Tropicana.

“After learning that a majority of consumers strongly prefer a clear container, we now have a truly unique PET bottle that will transform our entire line of Tropicana Pure Premium,” he said.

About 150 Tropicana employees have been retrained on the new production lines.

“We are making a sizable investment to increase the skill levels,” said Haycock, who estimates they have logged about 10,000 hours of technical training. A few extra employees have been hired in the process, he said.

The 36,000-square-foot building, which began in January, is nearly completed.

“We are putting in the utilities now and installing new equipment. We should be all wrapped up by the end of the year,” Haycock said. Some of the production lines are already working.

The company, which employs 1,400, processes 41 million boxes of fruit a season.

Whether all of Tropicana’s carton packaging will be changed into plastic bottles remains to be seen.

“We’ll have to see how everything goes and continue our market and consumer research,” Haycock said.

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