This New Juice Contains a Blend of Marketing : Foods: A vegetable-fruit product called ‘Vruit’ could mark a trend--but its maker might not reap the benefits.

“Papa was a veggie. Mama was a fruit.” With that advertising slogan, a Michigan company is trying to sell health-conscious Americans on its new vegetable and fruit drink, Vruit. American Soy Products Inc. is hoping Vruit will usher in the next big trend in American beverages: good-for-you drinks.

That category is being studied aggressively by the big beverage companies as well, says Tom Pirko, president of the industry consulting firm Bevmark Inc. in New York.

“The potential for beverages that are authentically good for you is almost unlimited,” he said. “Everybody’s thinking about it. These little guys are trying it out, but eventually the big guys will come in.”

Breaking a new product into this hyper-competitive business isn’t easy for a small company that lacks the marketing clout of Coca-Cola Co., Pepsico Inc. and the other beverage behemoths.

So American Soy, a subsidiary of Eden Foods Inc., is expanding Vruit into supermarkets one city at a time, promoting it mostly through in-store tastings and stocking it in the produce department rather than the crowded juice aisle.

It first went on store shelves in Michigan in late July and sold more than 15,000 cases the first three months. It’s now in nine states, and the company hopes to have it available in most major cities by summer.

Vruit is a mixture of vegetable and fruit juices in two flavors: apple-carrot and orange-veggie. Overcoming preconceived notions of how a fruit-vegetable drink tastes has been the biggest obstacle in winning over consumers, said Ron Roller, American Soy’s president.

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Mention vegetable drink, and most people think of the tomato taste of that juice aisle veteran, V-8.

“It’s difficult to get people to get past that,” Roller said.

Vruit is sweeter, lighter and tastes more like fruit than vegetables. When people try it, “they’re surprised--that’s the first comment we hear,” Roller said. “They’re expecting something different.”

Fruit-veggie drinks already are popular in Europe and Japan. American Soy tested several of those brands here before settling on the Vruit recipes.

A boom in healthy drinks here would follow tremendous growth in juice-flavored soft drinks and teas in recent years.

Sales of fruit-flavored drinks grew 12% last year, according to Beverage Marketing Corp., a New York-based consulting firm. Beverage Digest, an industry newsletter, says supermarket sales in that category grew 19% in the first three quarters of this year.

“There’s a lot of juices up there on the shelf,” said Timothy Redmond, vice president of sales and marketing at American Soy. “But most of them aren’t really juices; they’re kind of what the industry calls ‘belly washes’--just sugar-flavored water.”

Vruit is 100% juice fortified with the antioxidants beta-carotene and Vitamin C, believed to help prevent cancer. It’s more expensive than most juice drinks--a three-pack of 8.4-ounce single servings or a 1-liter container sells for about $2.30.

By selling Vruit in the produce section, American Soy hopes to reinforce its healthy image. “We want it to be seen pretty much as just like fruits and vegetables,” Redmond said.

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But having a healthy, tasty product alone won’t be enough--success in the segment will result only from shrewd marketing, consultant Pirko said.

“It has to do more with the head than the tummy. The problem is the consumer so far hasn’t been able to make the connection between something that is fun, sexy and that you just knock down, versus something that is more like a vitamin pill or medicine.”

In other words, just saying “drink it, it’s good for you” probably won’t cut it. But creating an exciting image for a drink is an expensive proposition.

“It’s very hard to do what they’re trying to do,” Pirko said. “If you do it right, someone else is going to come in with more money and blow you out of the stores.”

Roller concedes his company is at a disadvantage.

“We’re basically trying to do this customer-by-customer,” he said. “We’re trying to roll it out as we can afford to.”

But he said there is a big advantage to being the first to create a niche. Just ask the folks who started Snapple, which made a killing with flavored teas and juice drinks.

Vruit is sold in orange and green juice boxes, a possible marketing problem because the containers are mostly associated in this country with children’s drinks. Because American Soy’s major product, soy milk, is packaged in a similar package, it made no sense to convert to glass or cans for Vruit, Roller said.

Vruit is American Soy’s first brand of its own. It produces 1 million cases of EdenSoy soy milk for Eden Foods.