Langers Finds 100 Ways To Cash In On Antioxidant Craze
Source:	Periscope
Date:	September 30-October 31, 1998
By:	Andee Joyce
What does a rollerblading grandma have to do with the success of a 38-year-old family-owned juice business? Plenty, if the company in question is Southern California-based Langers. The grandma is the star of a television commercial designed to let the world know about the nutritional virtues of its new Langers 100 series - the first ever for the company's juices all morning and then going out and beating boys a quarter of her age in a pickup game of roller hockey, has drawn much attention and praise since it began airing in the Los Angeles are last July, including a rave from the hard-to-please Los Angeles Times. The 100-percent juice blends, which currently come in 64-ounce PET bottles, are being marketed to cash in on the burgeoning antioxidant craze. Langers Ruby Red 100 features red grapefruit juice and is fortified with vitamin C, B vitamins and iron. Langers Cranberry 100-cranberry juice mixed with grape, apple and pear juice to cut the tartness-sports additional vitamins C, A and E, along with calcium. Three more in the 100 series Raspberry-Cranberry 100 (with ginseng and gingko), Cold Buster 100 (orange, white grape and apple juices with Echinacea, zinc and 200 percent RDI of vitamin C) and Cranberry-Grape 100 (with vitamins A, C and E plus grape seed extract and Co-Enzyme Q-10) - will hit store shelves by December. Bruce Langer, vice president of Langers Juices (they dropped the apostrophe long ago), believes the TV ad, created by Buckley/Friedman of Costa Mesa, CA, gets the point across that antioxidants can add years to your life and life to your years, without making any explicit wellness claims. "The cranberry juice drinkers are already a little bit health-conscious-they drink it for urinary tract infections and so forth," he explains. He also boasts that Langers Cranberry-Grape 100 has "twice the flavonoids of regular grape juice, and as much as red vine," good news for those who seek the reputed health benefits of red wine without the alcohol. Langers juices have been a mainstay in California supermarkets for over 30 years, but Nathan Langer and his family have - naturally - bigger things in mind. Since Langers is a small, independent company, expanding in an eastward direction has had to be undertaken much more slowly than if it were a larger company. "Slowly, prudently, we would like to become national," Bruce Langer says. "But it's expensive, because the payment allowance to the large supermarket chains makes the most of getting on the shelf very high." He does note that in Chicago and Houston, two new markets for Langers, the juices have proven tremendously popular, even without much in the way of advertising.