· By James Smith
Developing our tropical flavour
A few weeks ago, we launched our new Tropical flavour. A big part of our strategy is built around bringing out new, interesting and unique flavours. So, it was a big moment for us to bring out our first new flavour since launching in December. The tropical now sits alongside our red berries and lime & elderflower hard seltzers, completing the trio (or as our brother affectionately and enthusiastically called it “the holy trinity”). Developing a new flavour is a really exciting process and it has definitely whet the appetite for more flavours to come. The general feedback has been amazing so far, with many saying that it’s their favourite flavour. But one of the things we keep getting asked was “how did you develop this?” So, we thought what better way to answer that than with a quick blog.
Arrowtown is like any other business in that we need to listen to our customers if we want to have any chance of being successful. With this in mind we made sure to place this at the forefront of our new recipe development by giving you the chance to decide which flavour you wanted to see. Over the last few months, we began collecting input from our existing and potential customers. We started by collecting surveys and also put out posts and polls on our social channels asking for suggestions. We heard all sorts of ideas and some will definitely be joining the Arrowtown line-up in the not-too-distant future.
The recurring suggestion throughout was mango or tropical. The people had spoken. Now it was up to us to give them what they wanted. So, with tropical thoughts running through our head we went off to our recipe development company with our brief. Our tropical flavour needed to taste like summer in a can, whilst still being fresh and natural.
The first samples
As the first bottles arrived we gathered a group of friends to act as our first focus group. Unsurprisingly, finding mates to taste test some free alcohol was the easiest part of the process... We went through a variety of different combinations of fruit, from mango to pineapple to passionfruit. We also played around with different ratios of these combinations, to decide which flavours we wanted to be more dominant and which we wanted to be subtle. After numerous rounds and trials, we settled on our final recipe.
All the time this was going on we were developing our new branding for this flavour. As with our red berries flavour, this drink is in support of African wildlife conservation. This meant we had to decide whether to stick to the ethos behind our first designs and go for something completely unique and bold or to align it with the red berries design. We then had the hotly debated topic of keeping the elephant or bringing a new animal into the herd. In the end we went for the lion with its intimidating stare and luscious mane. He means business. You can see the final design we opted for below, with the original tribal print given a tropical makeover.
From here it was a case of getting the cans made up and out into the wild for as many people as possible to enjoy. Thankfully, it seems like people approve of our choices and the tropical has quickly become a fan’s favourite with our followers. Try it for yourself here.
Stay tuned for our next flavour release, as after all three’s a crowd. Got any flavours you want to see? Drop us a line.
