Two friends from Brooklyn, a beer route and a rival across town.

AriZona is an American brand of iced tea and juice drinks, and despite the name it comes from New York. Reuters described its founders, Don Vultaggio and John Ferolito, as onetime friends from Brooklyn who launched AriZona in 1992, and TODAY reported in June 2024 that Vultaggio co-founded Arizona Beverages USA on 5 May 1992. English Wikipedia gives the same date and names Brooklyn as the place of founding.

The partnership is older than the tea. A company history published by Gale and reproduced on Encyclopedia.com says the two men went into business together in the early 1970s, soon after leaving high school, while both held delivery jobs at a brewery and a beer distributorship. They bought a used Volkswagen bus, took out the back seats and delivered cut-price beer and soda to homes and grocery stores in Brooklyn. The side business became a full-time one, and the partners added a used truck and then a small fleet. English Wikipedia names the early firm Ferolito, Vultaggio & Sons and dates it to 1971; the Gale history gives 1972.

The partners then moved from selling other people’s drinks to making their own. The Gale history says they set up the Hornell Brewing Co. in the mid-1980s, with Ferolito, Vultaggio & Sons becoming a division of it, and that an early flavoured seltzer named Spence & Wesley, after Vultaggio’s sons, did not succeed. Malt liquor came next. CNN Business reported in August 2022 that Vultaggio and his partners pivoted to iced tea after their malt liquor business, packing the new drink in cans of the same size as their malt liquor so that it would stand out on the shelf.

The model for the move was a neighbour. Vultaggio told CNN Business that he was inspired by Snapple, and the Gale history quotes him telling Beverage World that he and Ferolito “had been beer guys all our lives” and that iced tea was foreign to them. Eater reported in May 2019 that the owners, distributors since the 1970s, decided to make their own product to compete with brands such as Snapple. According to the Gale history, production at the outset was handled in Cincinnati by Hudepohl-Schoenling Brewing Co., the brewer that already made the partners’ malt liquor, and the tea was sold through the beer wholesalers the partners knew, with mixed “rainbow cases” so that small shops could stock several flavours at once.

Lake Success, Woodbury, a court in Nassau County and a factory in New Jersey.

The company soon left Brooklyn for Long Island. The Gale history says that by mid-1993 AriZona teas were sold in several sizes across a large part of the country, and that in the fall of 1994 the company began moving from an overcrowded Brooklyn warehouse to a corporate office park in Lake Success, on Long Island, while the sales staff stayed in Brooklyn. It adds that the company reached Canada through an agreement with Molson Breweries in the same period. By 2014 Reuters was describing the business, under the holding name Beverage Marketing USA Inc., as based in Woodbury, New York.

The range widened through the 1990s. According to the Gale history, the company introduced AriZona Cowboy Cocktails, a juice-based drink, in early 1994, added a ginseng iced tea in cobalt-blue bottles in 1995, and later that year launched a Soda Shop line of carbonated soft drinks under the AriZona name, with labels carrying the brand’s package graphics. A black-and-tan beer called Mississippi Mud followed in 1996. CNN Business wrote in 2022 that the product line had grown to include snacks, candy, coffee and alcohol, and that one of its popular drinks is the Arnold Palmer, a half-tea, half-lemonade drink named after the golfer.

The founders later parted ways. Reuters reported on 14 October 2014 that a Nassau County judge, after a non-jury trial, had set the terms on which the company would buy out the half owned by Ferolito and a trust for his son. The same report said that under a 1998 agreement Vultaggio ran the company while Ferolito moved to Florida. TODAY reported in June 2024 that Don Vultaggio co-owns the company with his sons, Wesley and Spencer; Eater named Spencer as chief marketing officer in 2019.

The drinks are now made in New Jersey. Courier News reported in September 2024 that AriZona is made in the Keasbey section of Woodbridge, where the company opened a manufacturing facility in 2019 because of the township’s proximity to major highways and railways. In mid-October 2024 the company opened AriZonaLand there, a free factory tour with a visitor centre, a museum and a gift shop. The paper described antique cars painted with green tea flowers hung above the floor, corridors decorated with cherry blossoms, a chandelier made from an old bottling filler, and rooms in bright pink and turquoise, with walls papered by Vultaggio himself.

The price printed on the can is part of the brand. Vultaggio told TODAY in 2024 that the company had kept the price unchanged by making the drink faster, shipping it better and closer and using thinner cans, and that he had no plans to raise it in the foreseeable future.

Design and documentation.

Ready-to-drink tea, flavored water, sports drinks and craft soda share a cooler shelf, but their packaging asks different things of a label. A tea can or tall glass bottle is often read from several feet away, so the name, the flavor and a colour cue have to work together at a glance, while the back of the pack carries ingredients, nutrition panels and the legal small print that every drink must show.

Flavored-water and sports-drink bottles tend to lean on colour coding, since a shopper picking one flavor from a long row is often matching a hue rather than reading a word. Craft-soda labels sit at the other end: many use illustration, hand lettering or a story on the bottle to suggest a small maker, even when the brand has since become part of a much larger drinks company.

Each guide in this group looks at who started the brand, who owns it now and how its labels, logos and bottles have been described in dated sources, and it marks plainly where a statement rests only on what the company says about itself. The colours and type shown are our own unofficial interpretation.

A water cooler, a perfume bottle, a colouring book and a capital Z.

The name came before the design, and it was not the original one. Vultaggio told CNN Business in August 2022 that he wanted a name that suggested a warm environment far from Brooklyn. Friends called his New York home the Santa Fe house because of its adobe-style design and its pink, yellow and turquoise colours, so he called the drink Santa Fe. “When I put Santa Fe on the package, it didn’t look right,” he told CNN. “I thought it looked like a train.” He settled instead on Arizona, a state he had never visited, and gave the logo a stylised capital Z because, he said, it looked better on the cans. The Gale history records an earlier version of the story, in which Vultaggio said the name came to him while standing in front of a map in his office, asking himself where was hot and what sounded good, and he described the map on his Brooklyn office wall again to Courier News in 2024.

The cans came out of the same family home. Spencer Vultaggio told Eater in 2019 that his mother designed the original cans: a water cooler in the family kitchen with a Southwestern zigzag motif in pink, yellow and teal became the lemon tea can, which went on sale in 1992. The green tea label, he said, was a remix of a perfume bottle his mother owned and one of his own colouring books. In an interview quoted in the Gale history, Don Vultaggio credited the can to “my partner, myself, my wife, and a gal in South Jersey who does our mechanicals.” CNN wrote that the checkerboard patterns and colours were inspired by the Santa Fe house.

Vultaggio has long described the package as the marketing. The Gale history describes the early cans as pastel-coloured, with Southwestern-style graphics, and says that by the end of 1993 the company also sold the tea in a proprietary long-neck, wide-mouth glass bottle made by Anchor Glass, and that the AriZona design was licensed for lollipops, freeze pops, beach towels and shirts. Vultaggio told CNN Business that AriZona advertises less than some competitors and relies on “packaging and a value story, then a great product inside.” He added that the package is why a person buys AriZona at the outset. Andres Nicholls, global executive creative director at the consultancy Prophet, told CNN that the brand had “been pretty fearless and consistent” and had created a very distinctive design.

The look has travelled into fashion and restaurants. Eater reported in 2019 that the company opened a pop-up shop in Soho in 2018 selling clothes and skateboards, sponsors its own skate team, and decorated the Brooklyn branch of Danny Bowien’s restaurant Mission Chinese for a “Great Buy” menu with a neon sign and glassware lettered in the style of the AriZona logo. Spencer Vultaggio told the magazine that the cans are so vibrant they act as “a statement piece” when someone carries one.

For a design guide, AriZona shows how a family’s own interior — a water cooler, a perfume bottle, an adobe house — can become a packaging system. Compare it with Snapple, the rival that prompted it, and with Lipton. For this guide we use adobe teal, blossom pink and zigzag yellow with a Western display serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep AriZona’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.