Look, we get it; success requires innovation, and sometimes, in pursuit of that innovation, we lose sight of what’s truly important. But imagine, just for one second, innovating in a way that’s so nuclear and so impossibly antithetical to your place in the cultural zeitgeist, that you feel obliged to address the nation after the fact.
Well, that’s precisely the position that Capri Sun has recently found itself in, and frankly, it brought the outrage onto itself.
Via Instagram, Capri Sun recently made the bold decision to introduce bottled drinks to their product lineup. This particular enterprise looks to be riding on the selling point that straw poking would no longer be required, as if getting a straw into a Capri Sun pouch isn’t among the most prominent and widely-available sources of dopamine currently on the market.
As you can see from the majority of the comments, flabbergastation was the key response to this mind-melting news. It got to the point where Capri Sun later clarified in a statement to PEOPLE that these bottles weren’t actually replacing the juice pouches, but merely offering another option for the degenerates among us who prefer the juice without the straws (such people not realizing, of course, that you’re not meant to drink a Capri Sun, but rather participate in it).
The company even sang the praises of the pouch by launching entire pallets of Capri Sun pouches for sale at participating retailers.
It’s a commendable and necessary show of transparency from the company. Funnily enough, this isn’t the first time that transparency has established itself as one of the company’s tools of the trade.
In 2014, Capri Sun first introduced juice pouches that had transparent bottoms rather than the silver bottoms that the pouches of yore usually came with. This was in response to an influx of complaints in which mold was found in the bottoms of the pouches, with the transparent bottoms intending to allow parents and children to see inside the pouches so that they knew exactly what they were drinking.
The only problem? Well, there was still mold; Capri Sun juice, you see, has no preservatives in it. In other words, the mold is proof of organic ingredients, but the cost of that is having to be very meticulous about how you store it, otherwise, you’ll end up drinking something you really don’t want to drink.
The kicker? Supply chain issues forced Capri Sun to revert to foil bottoms in 2022. So, in essence, they changed the pouches to fix a problem, it did nothing to truly fix that problem, and they went back on the change at the end of the day. The world of sales is utterly baffling.
So worry not, folks. The Capri Suns that you all know and love aren’t going anywhere; they’re simply adding bottled fruit juice into the business equation. The question is, could these bottles — demonstrably more air-tight than pouches — hold the key to ending Capri Sun’s mold problem once and for all? The battle rages on.