Share
For two years the half-litre was our best seller. It was also, quietly, the bottle that generated almost every complaint we received — and the two facts turned out to be the same fact.
Cold-pressed juice has a window. Ours is twelve hours for taste and seventy-two for safety. A 250 ml bottle gets finished in one sitting; a 500 ml bottle gets half-finished, re-capped, put back in a door shelf at four degrees and opened again the next evening. By then the drink has separated, oxidised at the neck and lost most of what made it worth pressing.
The part nobody wants to hear
People did not blame the storage. They blamed us, and they were right to — we sold a format that made failure the default outcome. So we stopped making it. Wholesale still gets 500 ml because a café pours it within the hour, but the retail fridge is 250 only.
Revenue per order dropped eleven per cent in the first month. Repeat orders rose nineteen. Six months on we are ahead on both, which is a satisfying outcome for a decision we made purely because the old one embarrassed us.
What we would do differently
Test the format the way a customer actually uses it, not the way the tasting room does. We drank every sample within ten minutes of pressing for two years and wondered why the reviews did not match.