Glass bottles of Joe Tea are a familiar sight in delis or seaside sandwich shops in the Northeast, but after 28 years in business, the brand has decided it’s time to bring metal into the mix.
At the Fancy Foods Show last month, Joe Tea showed off its new 12 oz. cans in three varieties: Peach, Half & Half and Sweet Tea. The brand’s first cans debuted in March and the next run will include an not-yet-announced fourth flavor. Currently, they are being tested in “a few hundred” locations so the brand can “get a front row seat” to their performance, co-founder and president Steven Prato said.
“While ‘launch’ would be a common way to imagine how one approaches something like this project –we really don’t think of it that way,” Prato said. “In the world of crawl, walk, and run; we are professional crawlers.”
The New Jersey-based company is no stranger to packaging adaptation when the situation (and growth strategy) calls for it. Like many, the company had problems sourcing glass bottles during the pandemic and briefly pivoted into 18 oz. plastic containers . The more cost-effective cans allow Joe Tea to get a foot in the door at on-premise venues where glass is often prohibited like sports arenas or live music events, while also opening the door for ecommerce.
Joe Tea is not the only iced tea maker complementing its glass bottles with cans. Just Iced Tea unveiled aluminum at Expo East last year bringing with it a more “accessible package,” according to CEO Seth Goldman. Seven Teas has also taken a page from the AriZona Iced Tea playbook with more moderately priced cans.
Glass will remain part of Joe Tea’s identity but the move into cans is about diversification into a format that is easier to ship and provides a better ROI once scaled, yet Prato framed the decision in simpler terms:
“We just employ the ‘make, sell for a profit, repeat program’ to all of our projects,” he said. “It’s a third grade math equation.”
As a family-run company without pressure from investors, this “crawl”-first approach to innovation serves Joe Tea’s needs of having broad-based revenue streams that can evolve over a longer period, Prato said.
“We like to be in a position where if we fail, we stumble from a low curb. But if we succeed, it’s to the stars.”