Fruit Burple

The short life and long afterlife of a collapsible drink bottle

In the fall of 1988 I went over to my friend’s house to hang out and play video games. Three of us took turns playing his Sega Master System and after about 2 hours we took a break. While in the kitchen getting a drink he showed us an all new beverage his mom had bought him. It was in a red container with accordion style walls that allowed it to be folded up. We had never seen anything like it. What we were seeing here was Fruit Burple and while we enjoyed the flavor, it was what he revealed to us next that really wowed us.

This wasn’t his first container of Burple, he had finished a Purple Burple, and following instructions on the package was able to turn the container into an amazing toy, a powerful water gun. Even though it was pretty chilly out, after a quick demonstration of the power of the Burple Water Gun, it became the rest of our day. We took turns filling it with water in his backyard and trying different techniques to get the most power and distance from it. While the Super Soaker would become the gold standard for water guns, a Burple container, with just the right size hole, could hold its own. Even if it was harder to aim.

So what was Burple? Where did it come from? How did it taste?

Burple was a fruit dry powder beverage that came in various flavors. Originally they were orange, fruit punch, grape, and berry. Eventually though they would add cherry to the mix. I have read online people mentioning peach, but I haven’t found any proof of it, the max number of variations I have seen mentioned in a print ad was five.

If I were to think of a beverage that it was most like, I would probably pick Kool-Aid. It was sweet, artificially fruity, and went down easy. I could rip through a container of grape on my own in just a few minutes. It really wasn’t the beverage that made Fruit Burple so exciting though. It was the accordion bottle.

These bottles were very clever. Brightly colored, they could fold down pretty small, about 12.8 ounces, but when fully expanded they could hold 64 ounces. This ability to change size made them easy to store and very light when not filled with liquid. When you got home from the store you extended the accordion bottle, filled it with water, and gave it a good shake. Then as you drank it, you could actually make the bottle smaller to take up less room in the fridge. Here you can see that illustrated as a selling point in a Wal Mart ad from the summer of 1988.

Sold by Sundale Beverages of Redwood City, CA and developed by Mattson & Co, Fruit Burple entered 10 test markets in the summer of 1988. Sundale already had the concept and the name when they approached Mattson, who helped them work through flavor choices. How did they come up with the name? Very simple, it is based on the burping sound the bottles make when you pull them open or close them rapidly.

As I mentioned they eventually added cherry to the mix, which is a solid flavor choice, they also offered a reduced size bottle that they called a Baby Burple. These were sold in a three pack and at 8 ounces it made for a perfect single serving beverage. Now I know you are about to ask, did the smaller bottle make for a decent water gun? It was okay, nothing like the larger bottles, maybe that is why they decided to mention in ads that it makes a great pencil holder. Or maybe they were just hearing from too many parents complaining about all the water shooting bottles around the house.

Burple was also briefly pitched as a way to make a kind of homemade sparkling drink. Some ads and coupons suggested mixing the powder with sparkling water instead of tap water. The idea was simple enough, turn it into something closer to soda. The bottle, however, was not built for pressure. The accordion design meant you had to vent it while mixing, slowly letting the gas escape so it would not force itself open. It worked, but just barely, and it was easy to imagine most people trying it once and moving on. Still, it fits the pattern, Burple was less about delivering a perfect drink and more about encouraging you to mess with the container and see what happened.

Sparkling Burple, anyone?

They also released some Burple bottle ideas around Halloween and Valentine’s Day. The Jack O Lantern idea works better, though it is hard to say how practical either one really was.

Burple Jack-O-Lanten? Yes, please.

Even if you didn’t drink any Burple at the time, you might remember the commercials that they ran on television. These ads, produced by the Los Angeles agency Campbell and Wagman were kinetic, colorful and had some catchy music. Two are available to watch online and are very late eighties. Here is the ad for the original large bottle Burple.

And here is the commercial for Baby Burple.

When you have a product that is known for reusing the container, other people are going to figure out a use for it. In the January 1989 edition of Popular Photography, they suggest reusing the bottles to help control the oxidation of darkroom chemicals. According to the article, “Gary Riggs of Lansing, MI buys the large size Burple for $1.69, and he’s completely stocked his darkroom with the bottles.” They further add that he also acquired a taste for the drink in the process. This novel use comes with a warning, do not use these containers if you have small kids in the house who could injure themselves when they think they are going to have a delicious fruit treat.

Burple hit supermarkets in 1987 and went nationwide by 1988. By mid 1989, despite the earlier introduction of Baby Burple it was already peaking and by the summer of 1990, stores stopped advertising it. While it’s not clear exactly how long it lasted after that, I would guess because of the nature of the product, it was still available in stores well into 1991. People probably had it on the shelf for years afterwards and many also reused the containers with other drink mixes. While reuse is good, I can tell you, these things were a real pain to clean out. It might not seem like a lot in retrospect, but almost 4 years is pretty good for a beverage that was mostly about the container.

I sometimes think Burple stuck around in our heads longer than it ever did on shelves, not because the drink was amazing, but because it gave you permission to keep the bottle and keep playing with it. That feels very late eighties to me, a product that assumed you would poke at it, repurpose it, and probably annoy someone in the process. You drank it fast, you burped the bottle on purpose just to hear the sound, and then you figured out what else it could be, a water gun, a pencil holder, a science experiment, or just something to absentmindedly compress while watching TV. Long after the powder was gone, those bottles kept showing up in garages, basements, and backyards, a little sticky, slightly warped, and still refusing to fully collapse. Even now, when I think about Burple, I do not picture a flavor, I picture that purple accordion plastic fighting back against my hands, which is a pretty good legacy for a drink that was never really trying to be just a drink.