After a year of growth in retail, canned iced tea maker Halfday is unveiling a packaging update that speaks to its maturation from next next-generation startup into a growing insurgent brand.
“The time to make a move was now,” co-founder Mike Lombardo told BevNET. “The brand is maturing and becoming more modern. We wanted to make sure we stood out among all the other beverages in the aisle.”
Standing out is more important than ever within Halfday’s corner of the beverage set. The iced team maker launched in 2021 just as gut-friendly, low-sugar soft drinks were beginning to make inroads among a broader subset of consumers. Now, as better-for-you brands like Olipop and Poppi battle in the modern soda category, Halfday is attempting to better communicate its position as an iced tea with benefits.
The revamped look moved Halfday’s name horizontally from the previous vertical design crawling up the side of the can. Along with reorienting its name, the brand simplified its font from its cartoon script to a more straightforward style adding callouts like “prebiotics” and “new era iced tea” to display prominently on the front-of-can.
To maintain some of the character that drew consumers to the brand early on, Halfday kept its color palette and slightly redesigned the illustrations of its flavor varieties: Peach, Lemon, Raspberry, Green Tea and Sweet Tea.
“People love the liquid but the [design] delivery was a little off from what the modern consumer wanted,” Lombardo said. “We didn’t want to lose any of the things people love, we just wanted to elevate them.”
In the last year, Halfday tripled its retail door count, going national in Whole Foods Market and expanding further in c-store chain Wawa. Halfday is currently in about 8,000 stores nationwide. With that growth, the brand’s team wanted to make its cans more “approachable, friendly and grown-up,” Lombardo said
“Seeing the can go onto a retail shelf is one thing, but when you expand into this many doors, you start to see it in different sets in beverage aisles. We realized we could communicate better about the brand’s values,” he said.
Competition in iced tea has expanded. Category leaders like AriZona, PepsiCo’s Pure Leaf or Coke’s Gold Peak still dominate about 50% of the sales dollars, according to Circana omnichannel tracking, but the dissolution of Honest Tea left the door open for better-for-you and premium-positioned brands to jockey for share. It has become challenging to differentiate on-shelf amid other iced tea makers like Saint James, Just Ice Tea or The Ryl Co. who have leveraged industry connections and consumer recognition to their respective brands.
With its new look, Halfday aims to utilize the growing consumer enthusiasm for low-sugar and prebiotic beverages – especially among a younger demographic. The company evolved around being a “fun brand” that was “shaking up” a category that had predominately been serving a demographic in their late forties, Lombardo said.
Halfday used that insight to build out its playful “90’s era” branding style which resonated with natural channel retailers like Whole Foods, Sprouts and Wegmans where the brand “built its foothold.”
Now, Halfday is expanding into more conventional and convenience channel retailers by lining up key distributors who can service those accounts. The brand has signed on with Big Geyser to grow its footprint in the New York City market. It is also taking a hybrid approach to brand building within other regions. It is using brokers in some areas where Halfday is still ramping up its presence, but within markets with a bigger network, it has been hiring direct sales teams to handle accounts.
Multipacks are another piece of establishing a bigger presence, allowing the brand to move into other store parts and drive more velocity.
“We’re at the stage where we are getting everybody to try one can. The natural next step is to get people to purchase a higher volume in four-packs,” Lombardo said. “But the price point has to make sense.”
Halfday encourages its retail partners to price it below $3 per can.
Looking forward to the new year, Halfday is planning to roll out its four-packs in select retailers and “doubling down” on its existing accounts to bring more varieties and more stores onboard.
The brand is also preparing to launch a Classic Half & Half variety as well as a limited edition flavor that will be exclusive to Whole Foods and Amazon.