One family name, three companies and a mango drink.

Frooti is a mango drink made by Parle Agro, a privately held company with its head office in Mumbai. It went on sale in 1985 as the company’s first product, and Parle Agro says the brand’s story in India began that year. English Wikipedia, which says Parle Agro commenced operations in 1984, describes it as an offshoot of the original Parle business, founded in 1929 and owned by the Chauhan family of Vile Parle, Mumbai.

That family business was later split into three separate companies, English Wikipedia says: Parle Products, the biscuit and confectionery maker behind Parle-G, led by Vijay, Sharad and Raj Chauhan; Parle Agro, led by Prakash Chauhan and his daughters; and Parle Bisleri, led by Ramesh Chauhan. All three still use the family name “Parle,” but they are distinct businesses, and Frooti belongs to Parle Agro, not to Parle Products. The shared name has been contested once in court: when Parle Agro moved into confectionery, Parle Products sued over its use of the Parle name in February 2008, and in 2009 the Bombay High Court allowed Parle Agro to use it on condition that it made clear its products came from a separate company, The Economic Times reported.

English Wikipedia lists Prakash Chauhan as chairman and managing director, his daughter Schauna Chauhan as chief executive, and Alisha and Nadia Chauhan as directors. The range has grown around Frooti: an apple drink, Appy, in 1986; packaged water from 1993; plastic packaging, in the form of PET bottle preforms, from 1996; the sparkling Appy Fizz in 2005; and confectionery from 2007. Frooti remains the company’s flagship.

A green carton, a PET bottle and Mangoticons.

Frooti’s identity began with its pack. It was launched as a ready-to-serve mango drink in a green rectangular Tetra Pak carton, English Wikipedia says, and at the time it was the only beverage sold in Tetra Pak packaging in India, the trade site exchange4media reported in a 2010 history of the brand, which called it the first fruit drink in a Tetra Pak and later the first in a PET bottle. Parle Agro itself says Frooti was the first brand introduced in Tetra Pak in India, pioneering the idea of a drink “on the go.” English Wikipedia adds that a consumer study showing demand for a resealable bottle led the company to launch Frooti in a hot-filled PET bottle; today it comes in cartons and bottles of many sizes and, according to The Hindu BusinessLine, is exported to markets from the United States and the United Kingdom to the Gulf, Southeast Asia and Africa.

The pack has moved with the advertising. In the 2010 exchange4media history, Parle Agro’s marketing manager Madhur Pandey listed small triangular packs, the move to PET and a new orange packaging among the tactical launches of the brand’s second decade, alongside youth campaigns such as “Yo Frooti” and “Bindass.” When the agency Creativeland Asia took on Frooti in 2007, it found that people who had loved the drink as children felt, once grown up, that it was meant for younger people. Its answer, launched in the summer of 2009, was the theme “Why Grow Up.” For the pack it designed “Mango Emoticons,” or “Mangoticons,” and by 2010 there were 21 different versions on shelves, the agency’s senior creative director Anu Joseph told the site. Packs of that period still carried a version of the original line, reading “Fresh N Juicy Mango.”

Design and documentation.

The seven brands in this group are all drink names from India: Thums Up, Limca, Frooti, Paper Boat, Rasna, Bisleri and Maaza. Indian drink brands in general sit at many different points in the trade, from family firms that still carry a founder’s name to names that now belong to much larger food and drink groups, and a single brand can be sold everywhere from a corner shop to a supermarket shelf.

A drink brand’s identity is usually carried less by a single product than by a pack, a name and the drink it promises, because the company behind the name may have changed hands, moved its production or grown far beyond the place where it started. That makes the questions behind each name worth asking plainly: who started it, who owns it now, and where its products are actually made and packed.

Each guide separates what independent sources record from what the company says about itself — its founding story, its owners over time, where its products are made and how its packaging has changed — and marks plainly what rests only on the company’s own word.

A jingle, a long wait for stars, and a rival.

Frooti’s best-known asset is a line. “Mango Frooti, Fresh and Juicy” was created by Arun Lahori and G. M. Menon, whose agency was briefed to make the drink synonymous with freshness and juiciness, The Hindu BusinessLine reported in 2019. The 2010 exchange4media history called it the base tagline since launch, carried by a jingle so familiar, Pandey said, that if you hum one part someone else will complete it. The adman K. V. Sridhar recalled to the site that the launch advertising came from the agency Ulka, and the history names TBWA, Everest, Percept and Grey among the agencies that later handled the account. Other lines have included “Juice Up your Life” and “Fresh and juicy got to be Frooti.”

For its first quarter-century the brand did without stars: in 2010 Pandey said Frooti had never used a celebrity ambassador. That changed in 2013, when Shah Rukh Khan shot a Frooti commercial with children, the news agency IANS reported. English Wikipedia lists Ram Charan, Allu Arjun and Alia Bhatt among later faces; Bhatt signed to endorse Frooti Fizz, a sparkling mango drink launched in March 2017, The Economic Times reported. Frooti was not India’s first mango drink, English Wikipedia notes, and a June 2020 report by the trade site Next Big Brand placed it second among mango drinks, with a 25.6% share, behind Maaza.

For a design guide, Frooti shows how a carton colour, a fruit and a jingle can carry a drink through four decades. Compare Maaza, its leading rival, and Parle, the separately owned biscuit company that shares the family name. For this guide we use a mango orange, a carton green and a ripe yellow with a rounded sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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