Tetley Canada chooses Amcor PET bottles for iced tea product

Leading tea bag brand Tetley Canada is entering the single serving iced tea category in 16-ounce long-neck PowerFlex polyethylene terephthalate (PET) bottles from Melbourne, Australia-based Amcor PET Packaging.

“For the past year we have been on a parallel path developing both the product formation and evaluating bottle options,” said Tetley Canada’s channel development manager Kurt Hatherly. “We…wanted to come up with premium packaging without the expense of a proprietary bottle. We went back and forth between PET and glass, trying to come up with the best choice.”

Beverage bottlers have traditionally lacked PET alternatives that meet their hotfill and aesthetic requirements, but Amcor’s PowerFlex has a revolutionary patented panel-less design and can meet hotfill requirements of 185 degrees Fahrenheit.

“Bottles with panels create constraints that dramatically limit design options and therefore a brand owner’s ability to use the container to creatively market the product,” said William Featherstone, vice president of sales for Amcor PET Packagings beverage division.

Tetley Canada chose a 16-ounce, long-neck design with a 38mm finish for its single-serve product. The final product is a transparent structure with a blue and green colour palette on the lower portion and tea leaves around the shoulder and neck. A Toronto-based company designed the seven-colour flexographically printed label.