Tropicana Products facts for kids
Flat version of the Tropicana logo as of 2007
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| Subsidiary | |
| Founded | 1947 |
| Founder | Anthony T. Rossi |
| Headquarters | Chicago, Illinois, United States |
| Products | Fruit juice |
| Parent | PAI Partners (61%) PepsiCo (39%) |
Tropicana Brands is an American company that makes drinks from fruit. It was started in 1947 by Anthony T. Rossi in Bradenton, Florida. For many years, from 1998 to 2021, it was part of PepsiCo. In 2021, most of Tropicana (61%) was sold to a company called PAI Partners. PepsiCo still owns the other 39%.
Contents
History of Tropicana
Anthony T. Rossi's Journey
Anthony T. Rossi was born in Sicily, Italy. He moved to the United States in 1921 when he was 21 years old. He worked in different jobs, like driving a taxi and owning a grocery store in New York. Later, he became a farmer in Virginia.
In 1940, he moved to Florida. There, he continued farming and also ran a restaurant. His first step into the Florida citrus (orange and grapefruit) business was making gift boxes of fresh fruit. These boxes were sold in big stores like Macy's in New York.
In 1947, Rossi settled in Palmetto, Florida. He started packing fruit gift boxes and jars of fruit pieces for salads. His company was first called Manatee River Packing Company. As the fruit business grew, the company moved to a bigger place in East Bradenton, Florida. They changed their name to Fruit Industries. This company even supplied fresh fruit salads to the famous Waldorf-Astoria Hotel in New York. At this new location, Rossi also began making frozen, concentrated orange juice. This was a natural next step for his fruit business.
How Tropicana Pure Premium Began
In 1952, Rossi bought the Grapefruit Canning Company in Bradenton. The fresh fruit and orange juice business was doing so well that he stopped making fruit gift boxes. In 1954, he developed a special way to treat juice called flash pasteurization. This process quickly heats the juice for a short time. It helps keep the fresh taste of the juice.
Thanks to this method, people could buy pure, not-from-concentrate juice that tasted fresh and was sold in chilled cartons. This juice, called Tropicana Pure Premium, became the company's most important product.
The company created a cartoon mascot named Tropic-Ana. She was a young girl carrying oranges on her head. She wore clothes that looked like a Hawaiian grass skirt and a flower necklace. Tropic-Ana was shown on juice cartons and even on the train cars that carried the juice. Her image was slowly removed in the 1980s.
In 1957, the company's name was changed to Tropicana Products, Inc. This new name showed how popular the Tropicana brand was becoming.
New Ways to Ship Juice
In the mid-1950s, Tropicana bought many refrigerated trucks. These trucks delivered Pure Premium juice. Soon, 2,000 dairies (milk delivery companies) were bringing Pure Premium orange juice to people's homes every morning. By 1958, a ship called the S.S. Tropicana carried a huge amount of juice (about 1.5 million gallons) to New York each week. This ship sailed from a new base at Cape Canaveral, Florida. From 1960 to 1970, Tropicana used special trailers on flat train cars to move the juice even more easily.
In 1970, Tropicana started shipping its orange juice in refrigerated train cars. These cars made one round-trip each week from Florida to Kearny, New Jersey. By the next year, the company was running two trains a week. Each train had 65 cars and carried about 1 million gallons of juice. This "Great White Juice Train" started on June 7, 1971. It was the first train of its kind in the food industry. It traveled about 1,250 miles. More cars were added, and small cooling units were put in to keep the juice cold on hot days. In 2004, Tropicana's train cars traveled over 35 million miles. Shipping by train is three times more fuel-efficient than other ways.
Growing and Expanding: 1969–1997
Tropicana Products, Inc. became a public company in 1969. This meant that people could buy shares of the company. In the same year, it was the first citrus company to make its own plastic juice containers.
In 1978, Rossi sold Tropicana to a company called Beatrice Foods. He then retired. In 1985, Tropicana introduced Tropicana Pure Premium HomeStyle orange juice, which had extra pulp (the soft bits of orange).
In the 1980s, Tropicana was bought by The Seagram Company, Ltd.. In the next ten years, they created new juice drinks. These included orange juice blends in bottles and frozen forms.
In the early 1990s, Tropicana began to sell its products in other countries. They worked with a company in Japan to make and sell Kirin-Tropicana juices. By then, Tropicana Pure Premium was also sold in Canada, the United Kingdom, Ireland, France, Germany, Argentina, Panama, and Sweden. As the 1990s continued, Tropicana expanded even more. They started selling in more Latin American countries, Hong Kong and China.
In 1995, Seagram bought the juice business of Dole Food Company. This included Dole brands in North America and other Dole juices in Europe. These Dole products were then managed under Tropicana Dole Beverages.
Sold to PepsiCo and the 2000s
PepsiCo bought Tropicana in 1998. They combined it with the Dole brand for marketing. Tropicana became the world's top maker of branded fruit juices. Tropicana's main office moved to Chicago in 2003.
Because of cold weather, Florida's orange crops produced less fruit. So, in 2007, Tropicana started using a mix of oranges from Florida and Brazil. In 2012, the company said it would go back to using only Florida oranges for its Pure Premium line. This was because people wanted to know where their food came from. However, Tropicana later went back to using oranges from both Florida and Brazil. This was due to a tiny insect called the Asian citrus psyllid. This insect spreads a disease called citrus greening. This disease has killed over 75% of Florida's citrus trees.
2009 Package Redesign
In February 2009, Tropicana changed the design of its juice cartons in the United States. The new design showed a glass of orange juice. The cap looked like the outside of an orange. The name was turned to be read up and down. After two months, many customers did not like the new look. Sales dropped by 20%. So, Tropicana changed back to its original design, which showed an orange with a drinking straw in it.
Changes in Carton Size
In early 2010, Tropicana made its traditional 64-ounce carton smaller, to 59 ounces, in the U.S. market. The price stayed the same. This meant customers paid more per ounce of juice.
In 2018, Tropicana made its containers even smaller, from 59 ounces to 52 ounces. This was because there were fewer oranges and high demand for juice.
New Partnership with PAI Partners (2021–Present)
On August 3, 2021, PepsiCo announced that it would sell most of its share in Tropicana and other juice brands to PAI Partners. This deal was worth $3.3 billion. PepsiCo wanted to focus more on healthy snacks and drinks with no calories. PepsiCo kept a 39% share in the new company. They also kept the right to sell these brands in the USA.
Tropicana's Community Work
In 2008, Tropicana started the "Rescue Rainforest" project in the U.S. They worked with a charity called Cool Earth. People could buy special Tropicana packs and enter a code online. For each code, 100 square feet of rainforest would be saved. This project helped an area in Peru where forests were being cut down. By June 2009, over 47 million square feet of rainforest had been saved.
Besides helping the rainforest, Tropicana has also tried to reduce its carbon footprint. They encourage people to recycle juice cartons. They also support the Sustainable Forestry Initiative, which promotes responsible forest management.
Other Products from Tropicana
Pepsi also makes fruit-flavored soft drinks called Tropicana Twister Soda. These soft drinks have mostly replaced Pepsi's Slice soft drinks. Tropicana also makes Fruit Snacks. In the United Kingdom, they make smoothies.
Trop50 was introduced by Tropicana in 2009. It is orange juice with 50% less sugar and calories. It does not use artificial sweeteners. Instead, it uses a form of the plant Stevia. Trop50 comes in different flavors like Farmstand Apple and Pineapple Mango.
Some of Tropicana's juice products, which are made to last longer on shelves, use a red color from cochineal beetles. This color is listed as 'Carmine' on the label.
In 2010, the company announced a new liquid fruit snack drink called Tropolis. It was released in January 2011.
In March 2011, a company called IRI named Trop50 as one of the "Top 10 Food and Beverage Brands in 2010."
Apple juice sold under the Tropicana Brand by Pepsi Canada uses Canadian apples. This juice has a darker and more natural color than the lighter juice sold in the USA.
On National Orange Juice Day in 2022, Tropicana released Tropicana Crunch. This was a special, limited-edition cereal "made just for orange juice." The cereal had oats, wheat, brown sugar, rice, almonds, and honey. Many people reviewed this product on social media sites like TikTok and YouTube.
Tropicana's Sponsorships
Tropicana sponsors Tropicana Field in St. Petersburg, Florida. This is the home stadium for the baseball team Tampa Bay Rays. The name of the former Bradenton Juice baseball team also showed Tropicana's connection to Bradenton, Florida, where its main office used to be.
Tropicana Headquarters
The main office of Tropicana Products is in Chicago, Illinois. PepsiCo, which owned Tropicana, planned to move Tropicana employees into its Chicago office in 2004. PepsiCo moved Tropicana to Chicago so all its juice brands would be together in one place.
Before 2004, Tropicana Products was based in the Rossi Office Building in Bradenton, Florida. This building was finished in 2002. In 2004, it was put up for sale. In 2007, it was sold to Bealls of Florida. The building was renamed the E. R. Beall Center.
See also
In Spanish: Tropicana Products para niños
