If the ad campaign for Minute Maid’s new RTD Aguas Frescas line looks familiar to you, you’re not the only one.
Last week, Kayla Castañeda, CEO and co-founder of Hanford, Calif.-based startup and BevNET New Beverage Showdown 21 champion Agua Bonita, posted an Instagram story highlighting how Coca-Cola-owned Minute Maid’s recently launched Aguas Frescas feature marketing similar to her company’s “Real AF” advertising campaign.
“It’s a nightmare for a small business,” Castañeda posted on social media. “We launched it last year — shirts, sweaters, shelf talkers, neck hangers, online quips, etc. to promote the play on words of ‘AF’ as “aguas frescas” and ‘as f*ck’ like the kids say. Only to have Minute Maid come in last month and do the exact. same. thing.”
The two campaigns both use “AF” in their respective marketing material and the beverage can design is similar in color scheme, but there are differences between the two products.
Agua Bonita products are sold in 12 ounce cans, have 50% juice content and lean into authentic flavor combinations of spice (habanero and chile) mixed with tropical fruit. Minute Maid’s Aguas Frescas are 16 ounce cans, contain 3% juice and offer more traditional fruit flavors.
A Coca-Cola Company spokeswoman said that the company was aware of Castañeda’s claims. The company says it “has a high value for intellectual property and the development of the Minute Maid Aguas Frescas product portfolio and subsequent marketing campaign has been in development for nearly two years.”
Castañeda contends that the March 2022 launch of Minute Maid’s Aguas Frescas came about a year after she presented her product to a panel of judges that included Dan White, Chief of New Revenue Streams at Coca-Cola. Agua Bonita eventually won the competition, which was sponsored by The Coca-Cola Company’s Venturing and Emerging Brands (VEB) unit.
During the pitch contest, White didn’t reference that a Coca-Cola brand company was developing a similar product but he gave constructive feedback to Castañeda about how to market the product in better ways.
Castañeda said that she understands that competition is natural in the CPG market, but suggested that there could have been a way for Minute Maid to partner with Agua Bonita to help elevate both brands.
“Imagine what we could do with a partner like Coca Cola to do that end,” she said, noting that 1% of every Agua Bonita purchase goes toward helping migrant farmworkers. “It could have been really authentic to the Latino community.”
This is not the first time a small beverage company has claimed that their product and marketing campaign were plagiarized by a large beverage corporation. Last year, beverage startup Droplet accused PepsiCo of “corporate plagiarism” when the beverage giant released its Soulboost enhanced sparkling water.
It’s also not the first time that “AF” has come up in discussions of beverage companies copying marketing campaigns. In 2019, alcohol-free craft brewery Infinite Session accused BrewDog of using the “AF” abbreviation on their line of alcohol-free beers.
Castañeda said she had been cautioned by people to not go public with her complaints but that just made her more inclined to speak out.
“Often, smaller companies don’t say anything, if they feel like their ideas are being duplicated or copied out of fear of these bigger companies because they control so much of the landscape,” she said. “As a small startup, getting even just one marketing campaign off the ground, can be a huge task and to just have it kind of done that way just feels wrong.