Juice Box Design: How To Win With Parents and Kids.

While juice gives the appearance of a category where competitors play nice, brands of juice boxes fight for prime CPG positioning across national grocers. Successful juice box brands keep kids and retailers happy when their packaging creates repeat purchases. With so many emerging brands trying to capture market share, the juice box design is as important for a juice box brand as the ingredients it contains.

Juice Box Packaging Design

The juice box is primed for a kid-friendly packaging design. The straight line shape of a carton juice box is a dream for a professional designer as it allows for clear branding and design visibility. Both single-serving drink and case packaging is a playground for designers to explore their creativity with different design elements.

This can create on-shelf opportunities or the freedom to fail since design-friendly packaging creates room for subjectivity from the decision maker. You need more than a hip juice box logo with bold color schemes to win in this competitive CPG category. We must rigorously test packaging for performance through purchase intent and product preference.

Juice Box vs. Juice Pouch Design

The Tetra Pak box continues to be the leading juice packaging for single-serving products. This isn’t a surprise to the consumer who has struggled with the pouch container by fumbling with the straw. While you may not squeeze out the last drop, the juice box simply offers more ease and satisfies the packaging experience.

Putting a parent’s package experience aside, brands may still choose a pouch over a box for economic reasons. Juice pouches are less expensive to ship. Also, unlike parents, kids love the package experience of a pouch. Squeezing the last drop and crumpling up the packaging is just plain fun.

Putting your frustration aside, think back to when you were a kid. Do you remember the experience of juice in a box or juice in a pouch? Which juice packaging design had you feeling like the incredible hulk?

Juice Box vs. Juice Bottle

The Tetra Brik has won awards for packaging material sustainability and continues to outperform juice bottles when purchased in case quantities. But if you want your package to be vending machine friendly, you may need to consider adding a plastic bottle to your juice product lineup. Otherwise, stick to the packaging box as your primary focus.

Healthier Options

No longer living in the low-fat era, juice companies cannot hide behind this marketing shield. Now, consumers are questioning just how healthy a juice product is. Positioning your juice brand as a healthier option should be a serious consideration if you hope to compete in this space.

This growing demand for healthy options, freshness and nutrient retention is also why many health-conscious consumers are turning to home juicing with appliances like the Hurom H200 cold press juicer, which is designed to extract juice more gently and preserve more of the natural goodness found in fruits and vegetables. In other words, brands have to compete twice as hard for their place in the pantry.

Brands like Honest Juice have created a new standard in sugar content and clean ingredients. It is now a category expectation for juice brands to showcase how “alive” their product is, even if it comes from a juice concentrate and includes added flavorings.

How trends repeat themselves

It isn’t just fashion that makes a comeback; we also see trends in the CPG industry circle back around. When fruit juice boxes first entered retailers, brands diluted their juices to cut product costs. Now, diluting fruit juice drinks reduces sugar intake and creates a healthier juice alternative.

Today’s brands perform a similar activity and appear to be “doing good” rather than being evil, profit-loving monsters. Funny, these do-good brands are charging a premium for their healthier option. No judgment here. It’s just proof that brands need to monitor the current market and identify opportunities to stand out in ways that satisfy the consumer.

Designing For Parents and Kids

Parents purchase juice boxes, and kids consume them (Ok, sometimes by parents as well). It shouldn’t be shocking that we create our point-of-purchase packaging design for the parent who wants to make the right decision for their children.

But once parents open the box, it’s the child’s choice if they will smile upon the first sip or throw the drink back in the parents face. We could assume that taste alone creates this response. We found kids determine the taste of things based on how they look.

That probably doesn’t shock you, but looking across the juice box products, few create distinguishing differences between purchase consideration designs and point of consumption packaging. With this data in hand, we asked, how do we continue communicating health without scaring away kids?

While working with Tree Top and their Fruit + Water product. We created a kid-friendly design we knew younger customers would love. Through a dual packaging strategy, we created a carton that on shelves appealed to parents, and we designed the juice pouch to attract children.

After several mockups, we presented the best-performing packaging to our clients. The result was 18% greater purchase intent over Capri Sun and a 22% increase in preference over Honest Kids.

The Appearance of Freshness

Our research found that showcasing fresh ingredients on the packaging implies a different definition of healthy. By nature, the juice box puts off a “stale” approach to fruit intake. It’s important for packaging design to align with the fresh juice trend that parents want their kids to drink but fail to do so.

Future Focus: Sustainable Packaging Design

Sustainable packaging is a purchase driver that is consuming much of the CPG industry. However, parents are still looking past sustainability if it means their kids will actually drink the product. But this may be short-lived, and sustainability may become a purchase driver that we showcase on the box of juice.

Like other beverage packaging designs, the juice box could shift to a sustainable first focus. Brands should start thinking ahead about how this trend will affect their current performance.

Packaging That Performs

Want a best-selling brand? We can help. Our brand development and packaging design agency helps companies like you win on-shelf. Book a time to learn more about our packaging work and discuss your project with our team.