Tropolis, an 80-calorie fruit puree, which comes in brightly colored pouches, will be marketed to moms and kids. PepsiCo's Tropicana unit is rolling out apple, grape and cherry Tropolis pouches in test markets in the Midwest next month, at $2.49 to $3.49 for a four-pack, said the [image-nocss] report.
U.S. rivals Coca-Cola Co. and Dr Pepper Snapple Group Inc. have no significant food business and have made bigger bets on soda, which is by far the industry's most profitable product.
PepsiCo's Pepsi and Lay's potato chips portfolios make up $50 billion of the company's $60 billion in revenue. But according to the Journal, chairman and CEO Indra Nooyi is staking her reputation on building out the company's "good-for-you" portfolio, uniting the Tropicana, Quaker and Gatorade units under one umbrella and expanding their product lines. Nooyi has said she wants to build the nutrition business to $30 billion from $10 billion by 2020.
To that end, PepsiCo announced earlier this month it would buy Russian dairy and juice-maker OAO Wimm-Bill-Dann in a deal valuing the company at $5.4 billion.
"We see the emerging opportunity to 'snackify' beverages and 'drinkify' snacks as the next frontier in food and beverage convenience," Nooyi told the newspaper. She cited examples such as kefir, a sour, yogurt-like drink that is popular in Russia and that some say aids in digestion. She said she expects to see dairy products mixed with juice, grains, fruits and nuts, all of which PepsiCo markets.
Mehmood Khan, a former Mayo Clinic endocrinologist who heads PepsiCo's nutrition group, told the paper that it is outdated to think that snacks are dry and beverages are wet. "Consumers don't wake up in the morning and say, 'I'm going to have a whole grain; I want a dairy product,'" Khan said. "They're looking for combinations of those things." Khan did not specify what combinations might come next.
The researchers who developed Tropolis said they worked closely with moms and kids to tweak the texture so that it would flow through the tearoff opening, the report said. They also played with the mix of juice and puree to achieve the desired thickness without adding gums or starches. Ingredients include apple puree, filtered water, banana puree concentrate and three other kinds of fruit concentrate.
PepsiCo already sells a refrigerated smoothie under its Naked Juice line, as does Coca-Cola under its Odwalla line, said the report, and Coca-Cola sells a squeezable fruit in Russia called Multon Rich Fruit Mix pouches, marketed to adults as meals on the go.
France's Groupe Danone SA has sold drinkable yogurt in the United States for more than six years. The U.S. market for yogurt has doubled in the past 10 years, largely because of the interest in products such as portable yogurt in a tube, according to General Mills Inc., makers of Yoplait and Go-Gurt.
In the United States, a major maker of squeezable fruit is Peter Rabbit Organics, a closely held British firm with products in more than 8,000 outlets, including 6,000 Starbucks coffee shops. "They're portable, they're squeezable so they're fun for children, but you can chuck them in bags or your purse," Peter Rabbit managing director Ben Ford told the paper. "It's been very easy to have drinks in the past but now you get the fiber as well."
Peter Rabbit's fruit pouches don't contain fruit concentrate or water. They are purees of mangos, strawberries and other exotic fruits. "It's more than your standard applesauce," Ford added.
Dr Pepper Snapple, makers of Mott's juices and applesauce, said it has considered making a squeezable fruit product but has no immediate plans to launch one, reported the Journal.
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