This bottled water producer says it differentiated itself on the shelf, improved its appearance, added supply chain-friendly robustness, and upgraded its sustainability profile, all without sacrificing the integral handle consumers love. Here’s how they did it.
Sourced locally from natural springs in Puerto Rico’s Caguas Valley, East Valley, and North Aquifer, Cristalia Premium Water says it bottles and sells the purest water on the island. The brand’s popularity there certainly substantiates the claim. Owned by vertically integrated Dominican Republic brand owner Diesco Industries and bottled by Diesco’s PacTech International (PTI) operation in Las Piedras, PR, Cristalia has long been the market leader in its corner of the Caribbean.
Even so, the brand recently had faced headwinds from near-identically packaged challengers in the 1-G HDPE jug format. Consumers couldn’t differentiate jugs of Cristalia from competitors sitting right alongside it on the retail shelf. This caused sales to plateau without much space for growth in a constrained geographical region. Outside of a race to the bottom on price, there weren’t a lot of levers to pull to help Cristalia to distinguish itself on a crowded shelf of similar-looking gallon jugs.
See Robopac on page 6
Secondary packaging follows in-line, consisting of a Robopac Dimac Nova 30T heat shrink wrap tunnel. Again, the complete lack of corrugated is notable here. Printed, registered shrink film is used to wrap these multipacks, affording them additional branding if they stand alone, stacked from the floor or on an end-of-aisle display in retail, instead of single units residing on the shelf.
