Tropical Cheese Industries resizes yogurt containers to keep up with competition.

  Tropical Cheese Industries recently decided to take the if-you-can’t-beat-‘em-join-‘em route with its drinkable yogurt by investing in a new package. To stay on par with competitors who had been shrinking their 8-ounce grab-and-go containers to a 7-ounce size to decrease the fill and associated costs, Tropical Cheese opted to jump on the 7-ounce bandwagon – but with one caveat. The new downsized bottle needed to give an upsized impression on the shelf, appearing to deliver more product than competitors at the same price point.

The solution – created by Berlin Packaging’s (www.berlinpackaging.com) Studio One Eleven design division – is a custom hourglass-shaped bottle with a pinched waist, accentuated curves at the base and shoulder, and a slightly taller profile than competing products. Tropical Cheese supplied new artwork and sourced the shrinkwrap label from its existing supplier. Berlin Packaging provided the mold, bottle and shrink application as well as working with Tropical Cheese to adjust the artwork to account for distortion during the shrinking process.

The new package hit grocery dairy cases in fall 2011. Without increasing SKUs or distribution, Tropical Cheese quickly realized:

• A 20% sales increase


• A 9% reduction in package costs


• A significant increase in profits

This summer, with those successes in place, Tropical Cheese proceeded with plans to add three new SKUs plus a 28-ounce size designed by Studio One Eleven to match the 7-ounce silhouette and compete directly with 32-ounce SKUs from other vendors. Growth projections are so strong that Tropical Cheese ordered more bottles from Berlin Packaging in six months than they had expected to need for the entire year. The company gives full credit to the bottle design for making less look like more.