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Mountain Dew gets brand-specific bottle

Design challenges include meeting operational requirements for ‘hundreds of bottlers’ and creating a new shape using the same lightweight preform for sustainability.

Pw 38423 Mountain Dew

Mountain Dew has broken from the PepsiCo pack, reenergized with a distinctive, new PET bottle design that more fittingly meets the brand’s promise of “a robust spirit of fun, exuberance, and refreshment.” That’s according to Stuart Leslie, president of 4sight, Inc. (www.4sightinc.com), the structural design firm that closely collaborated with PepsiCo to create an ownable brand equity for the 70-plus-year-old citrus-flavored soda that today is associated with a hip, sporty lifestyle.


For years, Mountain Dew shared the same 20-oz PET bottle design as almost all of PepsiCo’s other beverage brands, a packaging platform that most likely developed due to manufacturing efficiency, Leslie surmises. “But PepsiCo knew that there were certain brands that were really dying for a more appropriate bottle that would help reinforce the brand better,” he says. “Mountain Dew was on the top of the list.”


The process of creating a distinctive bottle structure for Mountain Dew was rife with challenges, not the least of which was meeting the operational requirements of countless local PepsiCo bottlers. But the close collaboration between 4sight and PepsiCo allowed long-held operational beliefs to be challenged, and design innovation flourished.


Operational breadth lends design complexity
As Leslie explains, a typical beverage client for his design firm may have two or three manufacturing plants, with a couple of filling lines in each facility. “The world of the sodas—the Pepsi’s and the Coke’s—grew up much differently,” he explains. “They grew up with these very local bottlers and distribution centers. So they have hundreds of bottlers. Each one of these is a plant, and each one has a number of lines that, over the years, they have set up to their preferences.


“Therefore, the biggest challenge we had [in creating the new Mountain Dew bottle] was working within this very complex infrastructure that is very difficult to even get your mind around.”

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