Leelanau Tea is a line of RTD teas and lemonades that are made with a base of tart cherry juice from cherries grown in Michigan’s Leelanau peninsula. The product line, which launched in 2020 and rebranded in 2021, features five SKUs packaged in 16 ounce glass bottles.

The flavors include Cherry Lemonade, Cherry Limeade, Cherry Sweet Tea, Cherry Unsweet Tea, and Half & Half. The cane sugar-sweetened varieties contain between 110 and 180 calories and 20 to 40 grams of added sugar. The lone unsweetened SKU has 0 grams of added sugar and 30 calories.

All five drinks have a pretty hefty dose of cherry juice. It adds tartness to all of the drinks, although how much is directly correlated to how low the amount of sugar in the particular SKU. Beyond that, the products have between two and five ingredients, which is a nice selling point as the list of ingredients is pretty clean.

That being said, the wide range of different sugar levels across the line is definitely confusing and something that we think could be challenging for the brand. Speaking of challenges, we think that marketing SKUs that have (up to?) 40 grams of sugar is going to be a bit of a dead end. Cherry Sweet Tea, which has 110 calories and 20 grams of sugar feels like a good upper limit for the brand. While plenty sweet, it  still allows you to taste the tea.

We’d even dial down the sweetness in the Half & Half, which, at 26 grams of added sugar,  is a bit too strong and unbalances the drink.

Finally, there’s Cherry Unsweet Tea, which has 30 calories and zero added sugar (there’s 5 grams of sugar from the cherry juice).  Coming in on the other side of the spectrum, this product is overly tart and frankly would benefit from some sweetness. 

Leelanau’s branding and packaging is bright and colorful, due in part to the backdrop of red liquid. The label features a large Leelanau logo, which gave us farm vibes with its distressed script font. There’s a large photo illustration of a pair of cherries that sits in the middle of the label and obscures some of the text under the logo (which says “local cherry mongers”). 

Some final lines of curved text (in a stencil font) sit at the bottom of the front panel. This section is used to call out the number of ingredients (up to five, depending on the SKU) and to list the name. While the overall aesthetic looks nice and is a step up from the original design, the products still look pretty similar to one another thanks to all of the flavors more or less having the same color liquid. Unfortunately, there isn’t really a way to overcome this.

Finally, we would love it if there was a bit more context to the reference to “local cherry mongers.” It’s not clear what this means and we think a bit more effort to tie it back to the roots of the brand and the quality of the ingredients would help the perceived value of the drinks.

Beyond that, if Leelanau wants to position itself as “Leelanau Tea,” we think it needs more emphasis on tea SKUs and should consider adjusting the high sugar lemonades. In its present form, tea feels a bit lost, both in the number of SKUs and by being overpowered by the cherry juice. We’d also caution that RTD cherry juice brands don’t exactly have a glittering track record of success, so leaning a bit more towards the tea category and less towards juice could be helpful for the long term.

There’s definitely some good stuff in this brand, but we feel as though the SKU lineup and positioning need some refinement if Leelanau is going to achieve its full potential.