In the dust of the HPP juice trend’s decline, two pioneering brands in the space have closed up shop. Last month, the parent companies of BluePrint and Daily Greens announced the two brands would be discontinued in decisions that now appear to be final.
Founded in 2007 by Zoe Sakoutis and Erica Huss, BluePrint was an early innovator in the cold-pressed juice category, helping to popularize the juice cleanse trend that drove the category to high sales in retail channels. In 2012, the brand was acquired by Hain Celestial for $26 million. Sakoutis and Huss left the company in 2014 and now run mushroom coffee startup Earth and Star.
On October 28, Hain shut down BluePrint’s online store and announced that the brand had chose to “close [its] doors for good.”
During the company’s Q4 earnings call in August, Hain Celestial CEO Mark Schiller named BluePrint as one of four underperforming brands that would be “sold or discontinued” in the coming months, alongside Rudi’s, Fountain of Truth and DeBoles. According to Schiller, the four brands combined generated only $27 million in sales and a loss of about $1 million in adjusted EBITDA. He noted that in recent months Hain has focused on exiting “small and non-strategic brands” which “consume a disproportionate share of management time and add supply chain complexity.”
Reached by BevNET, founders Sakoutis and Huss said though the closing of BluePrint was disappointing, it was not surprising.
“We built the business from the ground up, and were the category creators for cold-pressed juice who went on to set the industry standard by being the first to apply HPP as a solution for raw juice, but we have seen the brand shift its approach since our departure over six years ago,” Sakoutis and Huss said in a statement. “From the very early days, we saw enormous opportunities for a long life of success, so of course it’s sad to see the brand that created the blueprint (full pun intended) for the industry shut down before ever realizing its full potential.”
Hain Celestial could not immediately be reached for comment.
Though always a smaller player in the category, Texas-based Daily Greens’ closure comes just over a year after parent company Great Point Brands sought to reenergize the brand with an updated line of functional products debuted at Natural Products Expo East 2019. However, Great Point principal Jerry Williams told Beverage Business Insights — which first reported this story earlier this week — that the brand “did not survive COVID” and said that despite rising sales before the pandemic, the new market environment made it difficult to keep Daily Greens in business.
Williams did not respond to a request for comment from BevNET.
The closings follow an uncertain year for legacy juice brands, as The Coca-Cola Company this summer discontinued Odwalla while Campbell’s divested Bolthouse Farms. Though many juice brands received a shot in the arm from the pandemic, as sales rose this spring in response to a demand for immunity-boosting beverages, the HPP sector has still struggled to regain past momentum as smaller and lower sugar formats such as juice shots gain traction in the market.