Supply Chain

A chat with AriZona co-founder Don Vultaggio at the brand’s AriZonaLand experience

Vultaggio broke down the company’s manufacturing strategy and commitment to its 99-cent price tag.
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Getty Images for AriZona Iced Tea

4 min read

In 1992, one of the beverage industry’s most iconic products—the 99-cent, 23 oz. Big Can of AriZona iced tea—was introduced. More than 30 years later, the company is welcoming consumers to see how it’s made in an experience it’s dubbing AriZonaLand.

Located on a 3-million-square-foot campus in Keasbey, New Jersey, AriZonaLand includes a factory tour breaking down the beverage bottling process, plus its first-ever retail store and exhibits on the company’s history, like its innovations, branding, and dedication to the 99-cent price tag.

The company began in Brooklyn, with two iced tea flavors, Lemon and Raspberry, and now produces 85 types of tea, juices, waters, and beers. Its 600,000-square-foot New Jersey factory, opened in late 2019, manufactures 4,730 beverages every minute (including the Mucho Mango flavor on the line when Retail Brew visited—you could smell it), coming out to 6.8 million bevs daily.

AriZona Iced Tea AriZonaLand factory tour

Getty Images for AriZona Iced Tea

AriZona Iced Tea factory

Erik Wander

AriZona Arnold Palmer bottles

Erik Wander

While it welcomed its first tours this month, the factory—adorned with the brand’s trademark aquamarine and pink color palette throughout—was built with a walkway down the middle to give consumers a “bird’s eye view” of the production process, Don Vultaggio, AriZona’s co-founder and chair, told Retail Brew. At AriZonaLand’s grand opening, we caught up with Vultaggio to chat about the new experience and AriZona’s evolving manufacturing strategy.

This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

Why did you decide to open AriZonaLand?

Because our brand is so visual, and when we built the factories, and the factories are so visual, and that morphed into, “Let’s make it into this land and have all the colors and have people come and fans of ours.” It wasn’t a decision like that. It was over years of planning and anticipation. So much of our brand is people say, “I’m a fan of yours. I love it. I remember the first time I had it.” So we thought, “Why not have a factory that’d be memorable like that?”

What is your goal with AriZonaLand?

I want to have our customers experience what I experience every week when I’m here—the excitement of seeing cans and bottles go down the line with our colors and our graphics, the smell of it, the color of it, the approach to manufacturing. I’ve been in plants all over the world. Nobody looks like us, and they should, because paint and color and art—it’s expensive, but it’s not crazy. That’s a one-time investment for a lifetime of enjoyment. So maybe this will be an inspiration for all the factories in the world to say, “Hey, people work there. They should be exposed to colors and experience and whatnot.”

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AriZona has been around for over 30 years now. How has your manufacturing evolved since you first started?

To keep the price, we have to be more efficient. This factory is 10 times faster than the way we produced 30 years ago, and that’s how you keep the price down. Consumers don’t see that. They only see what’s on the shelf and the price. But it happens because of those efficiencies, bringing stuff in by train, by rail, shipping at night, lightweighting the can that turned into our ability to compute the price so the consumer wouldn’t be upset by us raising the price. So many things in this world have gone up. I said, “They don’t need another price from a guy like me.”

Do you feel like the 99-cent price tag has become part of the brand identity?

It has, and when we first did it, everybody thought it was crazy. In 1992 we started, but we didn’t have a price on a can. In 1998 with the price on the can, when we did it, people said [customers] are not gonna like it. I said, “Who doesn’t want to sell it for 99 cents? They don’t have to, they can buy other packages, but the consumers will love it.” I said, “It’s as memorable now as it was to cavemen thousands of years ago.” 99 cents is a magic price point.

Has it become harder and harder, especially the last couple years, to keep that price?

A plant like this has given us the ability to now produce at a better rate than we produced 30 years ago, because labor is labor, and if you’re running 150 cans a minute or 1,500 cans a minute, it’s the same person. So our costs actually per can has gone down because of the efficiencies we’ve done. Now, we spent a lot of money to be efficient, but you get it back all the time, so it’s good. And right now we believe we can hold the price for a long time.

Retail news that keeps industry pros in the know

Retail Brew delivers the latest retail industry news and insights surrounding marketing, DTC, and e-commerce to keep leaders and decision-makers up to date.

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