January 2009.

Tropicana, PepsiCo’s orange juice brand, was the undisputed leader in the US.

Its flagship product, Pure Premium, was generating more than $700 million a year.

A beautiful business.

So what does a company do when everything is going really well?

Sometimes, it overthinks.

And screws it up.

Someone in an office decided that the old packaging, the iconic orange with a straw stuck into it, was outdated.

It needed to be modernised.

It needed to be brought into the present.

You know the drill.

Cleaner.

More minimalistic.

More premium.

More “strategic”.

So they spent a fortune with a top agency and launched a massive campaign around the new packaging.

And they changed everything at once.

They removed the orange with the straw.

They replaced it with a generic glass of orange juice.

They redesigned the logo.

They changed the typography.

They changed the slogan.

They even added a cap shaped like half an orange.

On paper, in the meeting room, it probably sounded brilliant.

In the supermarket... well…

Customers arrived at the shelf and could not find their usual juice.

They did not recognise it.

That clean, white, sterile-looking package looked like a cheap private-label product.

Not the premium orange juice they had been buying for years.

Many customers thought it was a different product.

So they bought something else…

Egos are expensive, my friend.

Sales dropped by 20% in two months.

Tens of millions gone.

And competitors happily collected all the customers Tropicana was pushing away.

On 23 February, Tropicana announced it was going back to the old packaging.

Tail between the legs.

But at least they did one thing right.

They accepted they had screwed up… which is not easy.

And they accepted the sunk cost… which no matter what Business Schools say… it’s extremely hard.

Not everyone knows how to do that.

Look.

Something very similar happens in infrastructure assets.

Only with less orange juice and more board packs.

An asset can look fine.

The KPIs are reported.

The committees are held.

The O&M contractor sends the monthly report.

The public authority is not too upset.

Blah, blah, blah…

Everything looks under control.

But that does not mean the asset is creating value.

It may simply mean the asset is being administered.

And that is a very different thing.

In many operational SPVs, the problem is not a big fire.

The problem is value leaking quietly.

A small entitlement nobody claims.

A cost that is accepted because “this is how we have always done it”.

An O&M obligation nobody really pushes.

A board that spends too much time looking at compliance and not enough time looking at value.

And because there is no drama, nobody really looks.

Until years later, someone asks:

“Why is this asset, which looked so stable, delivering so little?”

Well.

That is why.

Because for years it was managed not to create problems.

Not to create value.

That is why we have launched the 30-Day Asset Value Review.

For 30 days, we review an operational SPV to identify where value may be leaking and what concrete opportunities exist to recover it.

Interested? Click below.

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