Juice Refined: Green Mustache Gets a New Look

Green Mustache Mixed BerryThe idea is simple: get kids to eat highly nutritious leafy greens by creating great-tasting, superfood-infused juices with playful and fun packaging. It’s the inspiration behind the launch of Green Mustache, a line of organic fruit and green veggie juice smoothies, which debuted in New York City last fall. The brand, targeted to reach mothers seeking healthier juice options for their children, made some headway at natural and specialty retailers in the market, including Gourmet Garage as well as online grocer FreshDirect.

However, Green Mustache founder VanTrang Manges gradually saw a following among customers who were buying and drinking the juices for themselves, noting that “adults, like children, can be finicky about eating their greens.” The two cups of kale and spinach in each 10 oz. bottle of Green Mustache proved to be attractive for adult consumers, and Manges saw an opportunity to extend the brand’s positioning.

Teased at the recently held 2014 Summer Fancy Food Show, Green Mustache has released a revamp of its packaging and now sports the tagline, “Greens For All, Big & Small.”

The most significant change is the brand’s transition from a squat, squared-edge plastic bottle to a slim round one. Although both are 10 oz. containers, Manges believes that the new package will help alleviate some confusion among consumers who perceived the original packaging to be 6-8 oz.-sized. The new look also comes with a label upgrade, which now places more emphasis on the name of each flavor variety and the addition of “Contains 2 Cups of Kale & Spinach” on the front of each bottle, where a USDA Organic seal is now joined by the now widely employed Non-GMO Project Verification stamp.

While the formulation of the products remains the same, Green Mustache will shift from pasteurization of its juices to high pressure processing (HPP) “in the coming months,” Manges said. She noted that the company “explored HPP when it was less commonly used for juices, but as a product for children, we thought it might be best to begin our journey using a more established pasteurization method.”

“Obviously time has proven HPP to be a safe process (and one that we’ve done our own challenge testing on to ensure its efficacy for our product),” Manges said. “We’re also making some changes to our production that makes HPP make more sense from an operational perspective.”

As for new distribution of the brand, Manges said that “we are exploring a few exciting… opportunities,” but declined to offer any details. In the meantime, Green Mustache is leaning on a key relationship with FreshDirect, which sells the juices for $3.99 per bottle — $1 less than their suggested retail price — and delivers the products to customers in greater New York, New Jersey and Connecticut as well as Delaware metro and the Philadelphia market.