PepsiCo looks to branded closures to help bottles stand out

ROSEMONT, ILL. — Caps and closures play a key role in keeping products safe and secure, but they also can be an important part of product branding.

Just ask Jeff Crooks, senior principal engineer of packaging brand stewardship at PepsiCo Inc.

The Purchase, N.Y.-based company is known around the world for its line of soft drinks, but the company is so much more than its soda.

With more than 3,000 products, PepsiCo is among the largest food and beverage companies on the globe with iconic brands such as Gatorade, Lay's, Tropicana and, of course, Pepsi-Cola.

And in the case of Tropicana and Gatorade, for example, the closure has played an important role in recent years to help advance branding.

The iconic orange cap of Gatorade has been updated and tweaked in recent years as PepsiCo extended the brand into new products, Crooks said at the recent 2014 Plastic Caps & Closures conference in Rosemont. The conference is organized by Plastics News.

Same is the case for the closures for Tropicana juice, where new closures helped launch new PET carafes — both 59 and 89 ounce sizes — and allowed the company to move away from paper cartons.

“The closure can make the brand,” Crooks said. “It can really stand out. If we get this right, a closure on a shelf sitting by itself, or sitting on your counter, someone will recognize it, know what product it's for, and hopefully it will delight them.

“Hopefully, it will be an easy experience, whether that's easy open, improved functionality in some other way. I think the closure truly can be the icing on the cake, so to speak, for the package,” he said.

Gatorade, he said, “is a perfect example of how subtle changes can have a significant impact on packaging.”

“We started out with a single opaque orange closure, which many of you might recognize. It was iconic. If you saw this closure somewhere you knew it came from a Gatorade product. But as the brand had to evolve, so did the closure,” he said.

The introduction of G2, a lower calorie version of the drink, saw the use of a translucent cap. This cap hinted at the traditional Gatorade cap but still stood out on the store shelves for customers to easily differentiate, Crooks said.

Even more changes came with the introduction of the G series line of products, designed to be used before, during and after an activity. Closures for the G series feature top printing.

Most recently, Crooks said, Gatorade is transitioning to a debossed logo. “It's clean, consistent, the G and lightning bolt are more prominent.”

PepsiCo food and beverages are consumed nearly 1 billion times every day around the world in more than 200 countries. “That's a lot of packages going through our consumers' hands,” Crooks said.

And caps and closures are right in the thick of the action.

“The packaging is driving the key brand image and the consumer interaction. You can't get into these packages without the closure. You can't close them, seal them without the closure,” he said.