Snapple

The brand that we know of today, Snapple, originally was manufactured in 1972 as an all-natural apple juice business in Greenwich Village. Arnie Greenberg, Leonard Marsh, and Hyman Golden founded the Snapple Brand outsourcing production and product development building their network of distributers across New York City. Despite many product flavors that were failures, premium pricing balanced everything out and Snapple was still able to generate revenues. Unlike Snapple, from 1972 to 1993, much start up juice companies had failed or were sold off to larger distributers. Howard Stern, Rush Limbaugh, and Wendy Kaufman were a huge part of the success. The original owners sold the company to Thomas H. Lee Company in 1992, who then sold it to Quaker Oats in 1993. Quaker owned Gatorade and thought that by purchasing Snapple it would be as successful as the sports drink once they started stocking grocery store shelves. Unfortunately, Business Week tells us that this acquisition proved to be one of the major U.S. business disasters of the 1990’s. The brand lost 1.4 billion dollars in value under Quaker’s ownership as well as the distribution channel power it had established years prior.
Four years later, Ken Gilbert and Mike Weinstein of Triarc, used research from a NJ group, Deutsch, Inc., to assess the company in hopes of setting priorities and to reverse the downward slide Quaker had left the company in. Ultimately, Weinstein had hopes of reinvigorating the brand, though Gilbert was hesitant. Deutsch had researched the brand and found solutions such as demarcating Snapple as a category set aside from any others like diet soda and chocolate milk. Weinstein felt that Snapple was an upbeat drink and that they should keep the ball rolling on an upward track to success.
Primary goals for Triarc in the short term go along with some of the business decisions the company made earlier when it was known for its “all natural” beverages. Increasing sales volume