Craving the familiar.

A good description of what many consumers are experiencing appears in a column called "Pulp Friction" in the NY Times Style Magazine of April 2009. It's about why some expressed outrage at Tropicana's (charming) design change in spite of the (adorable) orange halves they so cleverly used as closure caps. The author, Alex Kuczynski, says that "if the economic sands are shifting beneath your feet, it seems you want your orange juice container to look the same as it did when your 401(k) was worth more than, say, a carton of orange juice." To support her conclusion, she quotes an interior designer who says that "right now, we crave the familiar. " The author also cited a brief interview with the Tropicana package designer Peter Arnell, who had gotten a lot of flak on YouTube. Arnell defended the design, saying that "it is the one prominent brand that is not sold in a transparent bottle: You can't see the juice you are buying. "

I think Dole and Minute Maid would get righteously defensive about not being considered "prominent brands" by a design guru at Tropicana, and there is another reason for the brouhaha that may be more important. The reason is texture choice, which triggers as much passion among U.S. shoppers as topics associated with sex rather than food. Besides coming with and without added calcium, orange juice is sold in three textures based on how much or how little pulp is included. "Lots of pulp," which Tropicana calls "Grovestand," is followed by "Some Pulp" or "Home Style," and "No Pulp," which could be called "Kid style."

* "I hate it when the Tropicana is on sale and they don 'I have "Grovestand, " the only kind we use. The 'no pulp' tastes like flavored water, but the kids think pulp is yucky. They 'II only drink juice if it's pulp free."

(In my family, there is an almost perfect correlation between age and pulp tolerance--kids will have none of it, older adults find it closer to the real thing.)

The same kind of passionate distinction applies to peanut butter. Most of those who prefer smooth can't stand and won't eat chunky and vice versa. People who won't eat fudge or brownies with nuts outnumber those of us who won't bother eating fudge or brownies without nuts, which means that my cohort has been saved from consuming ten thousand calories over years of abstinence.

The bottom line here is that some things are really important in defining who and what we are, and when you change the graphics on those products, you are threatening to change our right to be ourselves. We're lucky that Tropicana responded to the outrage so quickly.

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