Thought Tropicana Toothpaste Was Weird? Check Out Its Mimosa Maker

It’s a pity that the name of Frank Meier is largely lost to history because he made significant contributions to it. As the longtime bartender at the Hotel Ritz in Paris, Meier—well placed to listen to conversations that SS officers had during the German occupation of the city during WWII—passed valuable secrets to British intelligence. He even assisted in the foiled plot to assassinate Hitler. Meier’s other deed isn’t as courageous. But it’s endured far longer. In his trademark white jacket and neatly parted hair, Meier is the barkeep who mixed the first mimosa. That was in 1925. Today, nearly a century later, it’s impossible to find a brunch table in a major American city without mimosas, the fizzy libation that’s half champagne and half orange juice (or four parts sparkling wine and two parts OJ, depending on who you're with). As far as mixology skills go, then, here’s a drink that requires essentially none. But don’t tell that to Tropicana. The juice brand just introduced a new device designed to make the world’s easiest-to-mix cocktail even easier to mix: the Tropicana Mimosa Maker. Booze-Free Retailers Are Having a Party and Everybody’s Invited Just what your home bar needed The name might conjure visions of the cocktail equivalent of a pricey Italian espresso machine. But this “machine” is just a pump sprayer that screws onto a 12-ounce bottle of Tropicana. The nozzle features three settings: whisper, spritz and shower. The device allows the user to regulate the dosage and frothiness of the juice dispensed into the bubbly. The engineering is clever enough. But the marketing value probably lies more in the novelty. As Tropicana’s senior director of brand marketing Jim Spalding told Adweek, the idea for the mimosa machine came directly from the “social listening” that the marketing team did as part of its research. “The three varying OJ spray settings,” Spalding explained, “were inspired by a behavior adults were already practicing on social media as they attempted to create the perfect mimosa with homemade solutions.” Tropicana’s latest curiosity The mimosa machine is also the latest in a series of amusing (if slightly bizarre) inventions that Tropicana began releasing on a limited-time basis beginning late last year. First up was Tropicana Toothpaste, a dentifrice formulated without sodium lauryl sulfate, the common ingredient that makes orange juice taste awful after your morning brush. “This is a great example of a brand solving a real consumer problem,” PepsiCo’s juice brands CMO Anup Shah told Adweek at the time. Then in April of this year, Tropicana rolled out Tropicana Crunch. Brace yourself: It's a honey almond breakfast cereal designed to complement orange juice instead of milk. (Kinda gross? Sure—but it made CNN. And this publication as well.) Following the template of the prior two releases, Tropicana’s mimosa contraption won’t be available in stores. Instead, a fortunate few will get their hands on one via a sweepstakes. (The contest runs November 6-10; register at TropicanaMimosaMaker.com.) Asked to explain the marketing strategy behind the machine, Spalding didn’t squeeze the orange very much. (“To bring brightness to breakfast tables,” he said.) But much can be inferred from recent news. Fruit juice’s changing reputation According to research by the Produce for Better Health Foundation, fruit juice consumption fell by 8% over the five-year period ending in 2021. Commenting on the report that year, Gail Rampersaud, a nutritionist with the Florida Department of Citrus, said that “our own research on OJ, using a nationally representative sample of Americans, is similar to PBH’s data in that we showed significant decreases in 100% juice intake.” As early as the 1930s, orange juice became the country’s favorite breakfast beverage. It was second only to coffee. Certainly, Americans’ love affair with coffee continues. In fact, according to the National Coffee Association, we drink more of it than water. But orange juice—long considered nourishing and wholesome—has come under scrutiny in recent years. The concerns are all about sugar consumption. A 2018 op-ed in the New York Times is a case in point: “There is no evidence that juice improves health,” its three authors wrote. “It should be treated like other sugary beverages.” Wariness over that shift in public perception might well have been part of PepsiCo’s thinking when it decided to sell a majority stake in Tropicana to private equity firm PAI Partners in August of 2021. In an interview with Yahoo Finance at the time of the sale, PepsiCo vice chairman and CFO explained: “As we went through an exercise over the past 18 months or so, we came to the conclusion that given our orientation toward higher growth and improving our margins, Tropicana was probably less of a fit with the portfolio that it was before.” Why Dole Is Turning Fruit Juice Into Billboard Ink While Spalding did not specifically address whether the mimosa machine was part of an effort to reinvigorate orange juice’s public image, it’s plausible that reminding consumers that orange juice can be a cocktail ingredient, not just a breakfast drink, might be an easier sell. After all, cocktails are indulgent drinks to begin with: If you’re not worried about alcohol, why worry about sugar? Meanwhile, though Ritz bartender Frank Meier would probably have been amused over the creation of a mimosa machine, he wouldn’t have needed it. For regulars including Ernest Hemingway and Coco Chanel, the mixologist poured 2½ ounces of champagne into a glass, dumped another 2½ ounces of orange juice on top of it and called it job done.