Brandjack News

There have been headlines about a recall of alcoholic drinks that were accidentally packaged wrongly and sold as the Celsius energy drink. 

Most people reading about this will have quickly picked up that these are separate drinks and the problem is not with the Celsius drink at all but with something that is wrongly labeled as Celsius. 

Of course, that doesn't help the consumer. You have a drink in a Celsius can it is not easy to tell if it is the real energy drink or an alcoholic drink in the wrong can. 

It might not even help the retailer. The mislabeled cans were all in High Noon variety packs, typically sold as a single pack, but they do sometimes get broken up and sold separately. Once out of the original packaging, the retailer might not be able to tell which is which and end up "returning" legitimate Celsius drinks to High Noon, meaning the Celsius drinks disappear from the shelves. 

Much of the reporting fails to make it clear that High Noon and Celsius are not just different brands but owned by wholly separate companies. It would be more intuitive to assume that a diversified company which has both alcoholic and non-alcoholic lines made an internal error, but that's not what happened here. Both brands share the same supplier of packaging. Celsius cans were sent to High Noon which then put its vodka drinks into the Celsius cans. 

So there were two mistakes, and Celsius was not involved in either of them. 

Worse, of course, most people don't write about scandals and business crises for a living. Most people will not have dug into this with the diligence that I have. They will simply remember that there was some sort of scandal with Celsius that involved a recall. The brand will be tarnished even though no one at the company seems to have been in any way involved in the mix up. 

The good news is that High Noon seems to have acted fast and implemented a recall of the variety packs very quickly. If any mislabeled cans were sold it is likely to have been a small number.