The deceptive new Fruju packaging has left a sour taste in the mouths of grapefruit Fruju fans.
Tim* couldn’t believe his eyes on a recent freezer forage at his local dairy. Nestled between the hot pinks of the Toppa and raspberry and lime Fruju, he spotted a gaggle of familiar friends wrapped in a bright, citrussy green hue, depicting slices of juicy, yellow fruit. Thinking he had discovered a rare clutch of grapefruit Frujus, his “pure joy” soon turned into “a swift misery that gave way to tremendous anger” when closer inspection revealed them to be… pineapple.
“How could they do this?” he bemoaned.
No ice block in history has been more reckless with the hearts and minds of New Zealanders than the grapefruit and lemon Fruju. Since the sour, tangy flavour joined the Fruju range in the 1980s, it has garnered an impassioned legion of sour-seeking superfans, including our own ice block ranker extraordinaire Madeleine Chapman. “Just the sourest of sour treats that somehow works,” she wrote in 2021, awarding it the coveted spot of fourth best ice block in the country.
From those dizzying heights soon came crushing news that sent fans right back to the freezer-scouring days of the Great Grapefruit Shortage of 2018. In May 2023, Tip Top spokesperson Ben Schurr confirmed to The Spinoff that the beloved piquant flavour had been discontinued. “It was the least popular of the flavours… it does have a very strong group of people who love it, but we’re not making it at the moment,” he said at the time.
But not unlike a toxic MAFS groom seeing the error of their ways, grapefruit soon came crawling back. Lovebombing fans for a limited time only in select stores around the country in 2024, Tip Top told The Spinoff at the time that it had heeded the call of outraged customers. “We’ve had a lot of incoming inquiries from grapefruit and lemon fans over the last 12 months and luckily we’ve found the packaging and materials to be able to put together a limited run.”
Since then, those precious zesty green packets have continued to dwindle in numbers nationwide, with Schurr from Tip Top confirming to The Spinoff this week that the company discontinued making the Grapefruit Fruju earlier this year. “There will probably still be some limited amounts available in some stores around New Zealand, but likely these will disappear over the coming months. After that there will be no Grapefruit Frujus available,” he said.
It is this years-long rollercoaster that left Tim understandably in “disbelief” when he realised that other Fruju flavours were cosplaying as the cult classic. “If grapefruit is so unpopular that you just had to destroy our dreams and get rid of it, why dress mutton (pineapple) up as lamb (grapefruit) and expect us to just be OK with it?” It isn’t just the single-serve Frujus in disguise either – the Fruju boxes at the supermarket also boast a distinctive grapefruit-like green.
In lieu of paying for forensic colour analysis, I sent swatches of the grapefruit Fruju and the new Fruju packaging to The Spinoff’s Robbie Nicol, office champion of the colour-identification game Hues and Clues. “These two colours are basically the same,” he opined. “The left makes me feel like I am sitting patiently in the waiting room of a mental healthcare facility. The right makes me feel like I am looking at a faded photograph of Shrek, presumably mourning his death.”
Nicol agreed that grapefruit fans were right to feel hoodwinked by the similarities, which then raised another crucial question – why did Tip Top do this at all? “Fruju was well overdue for an update of its packaging and a refresh of how the brand appears,” said Schurr. “The green colour was chosen as Fruju often appears next to Popsicle in freezers and, as many people know, Popsicles have blue coloured packaging, so green is a good contrast to tell them apart.”
Schurr added it was never Tip Top’s intention to drum up false hope for grapefruit and lemon enthusiasts passing by their local freezer. “We weren’t trying to trick our loyal grapefruit Fruju fans at all! It is a bit of an unfortunate coincidence for them that the green colour is close to that of the old grapefruit Fruju packaging,” he said. “We do however think it looks great on all the flavours, which are all worth trying if you haven’t.”
It’s a dangerous game, mentioning other Fruju flavours at a tumultuous time like this. With the spring blooms heralding warmer days to come, it‘s only a matter of time before the heat sets in and we start pawing at the freezer for more discontinued treats of old. For example, after making thirsty work of his grapefruit green colour analysis, Nicol threw out another demand for Tip Top that serves as a timely reminder that Fruju fans may move on, but they never forget:
“Please bring back Tropical Snow on a permanent basis.”
*Not his real name, but his real Fruju opinions
