They must think it’s a big deal because it’s right on the label. Maybe the cost is lower or they have a lot of clumsy users who kept breaking the glass bottles. I think in the past glass was cheaper than plastic in some cases.
They switched over, at least in my area, at least a year or two ago.
I figured it would be an issue since the glass bottles are so iconic. At my store, I didn’t hear any one even comment on them. Granted, they look almost identical, but they do feel different when you pick them up.
Further more, breakage is all but unheard of now. I get a snapple delivery each week, and usually at least once a month I’d have to send a case or two back because of a broken bottle*. Not anymore. Now they only way the bottles have issues is if they get dropped upside down or somehow otherwise hit just right to dent the lid and lose the seal.
It’s not about clumsy users, they really don’t care what happens after the end user buys it. It’s about the cost to them when it’s broken before it makes it to a store as well as the amount of fuel they’ll save driving around trucks full of plastic bottles instead of glass. I assume the bottles also cost them considerably less as well.
*When you send back a case of snapple because of a broken bottle, they’ll put the remaining bottles on the side (in their warehouse) until they can make a full case of it and send that back out. I’d refuse those as well. Best case scenario, they’d be all sticky, worse case, I’ve cut myself a few times grabbing at them and getting glass shards in my hand. After one or two times getting cut, I stopped accepting anything (at least glass) that wasn’t in it’s original packaging.
How am I supposed to make drinking goblets out of the empty bottles now?
I wonder if this might backfire on them, in a PR sense. There’s a growing public sentiment away from single-use plastic containers. Whether those folks are willing to pay extra, and how much, remains to be seen.
If it was going to, I’d think it already would have. The plastic snapple bottles aren’t anything new at this point (perhaps they may be in the OP’s area, but overall, they’re not).
I don’t know how recycling and environmental issues plastic vs glass work out, but Snapple not only isn’t the only one in plastic, they’re were one of the few still using glass. Other than Calypso Lemonade and Starbucks, it seems most everything comes in plastic (and metal). It wouldn’t surprise me if Gatorade/Powerade goes through as many plastic bottles as snapple does.
But is a single use glass container any better than a single use plastic container? It’s still single use. It’s not as if Snapple bottlers were collecting the glass bottles and washing and refilling them. That would probably be the best option from an environmental standpoint, and is how it’s done in some countries.
I’m pretty sure that’s how it was done in the US, decades ago. But I think if you add up the actual cost of collecting glass bottles, returning them to the bottling plant, washing them and refilling them, that is more expensive and has a greater carbon footprint than collecting plastic bottles for recycling.
I read the thread title as “Scrapple now in plastic bottles”, and shuddered. Love scrapple, but not in plastic bottles.