Sarilla is a line of RTD sparkling teas that are made with tea grown in Rwanda. The product line, which is packaged in 12 ounce slim cans, features four flavors including Lemon Black Tea, Apple Black Tea, Hibiscus Green Tea and Ginger White Tea. 

The products are made with a base of organic tea, carbonated water, and flavorings that come from real ingredients rather than flavors. The products are USDA Organic certified and use Fair Trade certified tea.

While the products share the same general approach to formulation, they differ in how they are sweetened. At the low end of the spectrum are the Hibiscus Green Tea and Ginger White Tea SKUs, which contain no added sugar and are sweetened with monk fruit, ending up at 5 calories per can. The Apple Black Tea, which has 55 calories per can, contains no added sugar but is sweetened and flavored with apple juice – which has 12 grams of sugar per can. Lastly, Lemon Black Tea, the lone product that is sweetened with 9 grams of organic cane sugar, has 35 calories per can. 

As a result, Sarilla’s four SKUs vary quite a bit in flavor. Starting with the two 5-calorie SKUs, Hibiscus Green Tea and Ginger White Tea, these products are light in body and have the most tea-forward flavor profiles. There’s a noticeable note of ginger in the Ginger White Tea, but we couldn’t taste hibiscus in the Hibiscus Green Tea. However in both cases we could, unfortunately, taste the monk fruit.  If Sarilla can improve on this, we think the products would be pretty appealing low calorie offerings.

Moving on to the sweetened varieties, Lemon Black Tea and Apple Black Tea, we found both of these to be quite enjoyable.  We especially liked the clean and simple flavor of the former, which is a riff on the most popular RTD tea flavor. There’s added sugar, but it’s not overpowering, and the carbonation gives it a nice crisp finish.  Finally, there’s Apple Black Tea, which has notes of apple juice and black tea and has a crisp dry finish. But if we’re being honest, we feel that it will be a tough sell to get an adult consumer to drink a product with an apple juice flavor.

On the packaging front, Sarilla has been given a pretty big visual upgrade since its prior two efforts.  The brand finally feels as though it has a good foundation to work with and the curb appeal is vastly improved, especially from its original life as Silverback.

However, we think there are two things that they should address. First, the selection of flavors and the inconsistency in terms of sweeteners and calories should be reconsidered; we think that the brand should just pick one direction and go with it. It’s going to be really hard (and confusing to the consumer) to have drinks ranging from 5 to 55 calories with a choice of monk fruit, cane sugar or apple juice sweetened varieties. 

Second, the packaging still needs some fine tuning. The first thing that should absolutely be removed is the center callout for “0 alcohol.” This is a tea beverage, not something that would normally contain alcohol and it’s definitely an unnecessary distraction that’s taking up prime real estate. We’d go even a step further and suggest that the labels for all of the SKUs should, much like our prior suggestion about calories/sugar, be consistent.  Calling out sugar content and calories would be most useful and placing the USDA Organic seal here would certainly be more useful than calling out the number of ingredients as they do on the Apple Black Tea.  Finally, we’d make the front label copy a bit larger as some of it is just too small to see from anything other than up close.

In the end, Sarilla’s latest update is a good one that takes the brand further in the right direction.  With some further cleanup and focus, we think that they’ve got the makings of a strong offering.