Organic Avenue to retire its $2 glass bottle deposit

While Organic Avenue’s Green Love juice goes down smoothly, we always choked on the $2 bottle deposit, which turned an already expensive $10 green juice into a $12 purchase.

(Every time we laid down a wad of cash, we couldn’t help but think, BluePrintCleanse and Cooler Cleanse charge $9 and $8.45 for their green juices, and there’s no bottle deposit!)

Sure, you get your bottle deposit back, but walking around with a heavy glass bottle and fitting its return into an already busy day certainly doesn’t add to your juice high. Most of our bottles ended up as vases.

And trucking around the dirty bottles and cleaning them proved an operation bane for Organic Avenue, too, an insider told us.

Starting next month, Organic Avenue will introduce new lightweight new glass bottles that will just require the normal five-cent deposit. Organic Avenue will also introduce a biodegradable plastic bottle later in 2012. For a company that’s staked much of its brand identity on glass bottling, this is a major change.

The new consumer-friendly packaging is definitely a sign that this indie juice brand means business and wants to grow beyond the hard-core juice aficionados who didn’t mind the premium pricing and the bottle schlepping.