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New Honest Tea label celebrates ingredient origins

To brighten up its packaging and develop a common graphic element for all of its product lines, Honest Tea undertakes a two-year redesign project for its bottled tea.

Pw 77415 Honest Extra

Launched in 1998 and now the nation’s top-selling organic bottled tea, the Honest Tea brand is known for its healthy and exotic ingredients and corporate social responsibility efforts. The brand is also known for its iconic packaging graphicsβ€”a β€œkeyhole T” and black borderβ€”used on the labels for its glass and PET bottles of ready-to-drink tea. But after using the same label elements for 16 years, Bethesda, MD-based Honest Tea felt it was time for a brand refresh.

β€œWe had been on the shelf for 16 years with the same basic look,” says co-founder and TeaEO Seth Goldman. β€œAs much as we had become the best-selling tea in the natural foods category, and as much as we continue to grow, we felt it was an appropriate time to be thinking about what we could do on our labels to bring out the ingredients and the romanceβ€”the cultures behind our drinksβ€”in a more explicit way.”

Also, having broadened its product line over the years to include such beverages as Honest Kids organic juice and Honest Fizz carbonated drinks, Honest Tea wanted to create a vehicle that would communicate that these products were part of the Honest Tea brand portfolio. β€œWe realized we couldn’t use the big β€˜T’ when we made a kids’ drink that doesn’t use tea, and Honest Fizz, which isn’t a tea line either,” says Goldman.

The two-year redesign project, led by company Creative Director Michael Kravit, involved label graphics for the Honest Tea 16-oz glass bottle, sold primarily in the natural foods channel as well as in natural food coops and in smaller, independent natural food retailers. Explains Goldman, varieties packaged in the glass bottle are somewhat more artisanal than Honest Tea’s products in PET bottles, for mainstream retail distribution, and include less familiar ingredients (i.e., rooibos, lemon myrtle, tulsi, and white clover honey).

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