How the fizz went out of totally tropical Lilt

RIP Lilt. The pineapple & grapefruit pop was canned in February after nearly 50 years on sale, prompting outpourings of rage and nostalgia in equal measure on social media.

Opportunists saw it as a chance to auction off remaining stock for ridiculous sums on eBay. And at least two people set up Change.org petitions pleading with Coca-Cola to give the brand a stay of execution.

Meanwhile, Cawston Press saw it as a chance for a cheap dig at Lilt’s expense. The brand ran ads touting an as-yet unlaunched Pineapple & Grapefruit Caribbean Crush with the tagline “Goodbye Lilt… Hello Cawston?”

It followed up in a similar vein on Instagram. “Lilt has gone the same way as many other nostalgic brands. So, what if we created our own?” it teased.

Yet the logic behind the retirement of Lilt was readily apparent.

“In such a dynamic soft drinks market, popular brands can’t simply rely on their reputation to keep driving sales,” says Martin Attock, VP for commercial development at Coca-Cola Europacific Partners (CCEP), Lilt’s UK distributor since 1975.

“Even the biggest and best-loved brands have to keep innovating and evolving to stay relevant,” he adds.

By the end, Lilt hardly ranked with the biggest or best-loved brands in soft drinks. It hadn’t advertised since the 1990s and news of its demise got more press than it’d had in years.

Added to that, its “totally tropical” taste will soon be available as Fanta Pineapple & Grapefruit, recipe unchanged.

That may help it grow its sales from a rather paltry £15.6m last year [NIQ 52 w/e 10 September 2022]. In the same period the Fanta brand overall was worth £281m, and growing in double-digit percentages for both value and volume.

More recent figures show Fanta is the UK’s fastest-growing major soft drinks brand. Its value is up a fifth, while units are up 13.9% (see p52).

This is largely down to the brand investment that Lilt sorely lacked over the past two decades. Fanta has been the subject of multimillion-pound marketing campaigns such as #WhatTheFanta, as well as Halloween activity and limited editions.

It’s hard to see a revival of the Lilt Ladies from the TV ads of the 1990s or the Lilt Man of the 1980s generating the same rate of sale for CCEP. And given the heightening of cultural sensitivities in the decades since, reggae blasting from speakers as Europeans laze around on white sand beaches glugging Lilt is an unlikely recipe for attracting new drinkers.

That isn’t stopping loyal fans trying their best, though. The person behind one of the Change.org petitions frothed: “We need to save the totally tropical taste. Won’t someone think of the Lilt Ladies!”

That call has gone unheeded. So far, the petition has attracted fewer than 100 signatures.