To celebrate his birthday each year, Don Vultaggio wears his pajamas to work and spends the day flipping pancakes and omelettes on a portable stovetop for his employees.
The sight is unusual — but then again, so is Vultaggio’s approach to business.
In 1990, he co-founded AriZona Beverage Company. It’s now America’s top-selling iced tea company, with upwards of $4 billion in annual sales.
Through it all, the company has remained privately owned and kept the price for its iconic tall-boys the same — just 99 cents.
Vultaggio’s credits his business’s success, in part, to creating a unique corporate culture and retaining employees.
At AriZona’s headquarters in Woodbury, NY, staff not only gather for Vultaggio’s annual birthday pajama party, but there are also annual celebrations for Halloween and Cinco de May — the iced tea launched May 5 — and an Italian dinner featuring vegetables and herbs grown on the rooftop by Vultaggio’s wife. Families are encouraged to attend.
“The work I do affects the livelihood of everyone that works [here],” Vultaggio said. “I take that very personally.”
Here, he spills the tea on other strategies that have been crucial to AriZona’s success.
Independence at all costs
AriZona is dwarfed by competitors such as PepsiCo and Coca-Cola, but those giants’ public ownership comes with strings attached: regulatory hurdles, shareholder pressures, compliance costs and layers of bureaucracy.
When something isn’t working, executives can spend months haggling with their board.
Being family-owned and privately-run allows AriZona to be nimble and agile.
If there’s a problem, Vultaggio said, “We change it at lunch.”
In an industry where product development typically takes years, Vultaggio and co. are able to roll out between 12 and 16 new drinks or flavors per year.
This month, two of the brand’s most unconventional offerings are hitting shelves: a 100-calorie vodka-infused iced tea and a one-gallon boxed cold brew coffee. Vultaggio said they each took about three months to go from conception to store shelves.
The vodka drink — an upgrade over a previous malt-based product and AriZona’s first premium boozy beverage — has been successful in Canada. It aims to be AriZona’s answer to High Noon and other health-conscious hard drinks, an increasingly lucrative market.
Similarly, the coffee beverage will give AriZona a foothold into a booming cold brew market, which was valued at $3.16 billion in 2024 and expected to grow to $16.22 billion by 2032.
Having spent years perfecting a cold brewing process for teas, and with all the requisite infrastructure already in place, the move was a natural one for AriZona.
“Brewing is brewing,” Vultaggio said.
Let the brand speak for itself
AriZona has never ran a print or broadcast ad, instead letting its beverages do the talking.
“We make [them] taste good and price [them] fair,” Vultaggio said of his simplistic approach. “Take care of customers and they take care of you.”
While competitors blow millions on Super Bowl ads (and cut corners elsewhere to pay for them), AriZona leans on merch drops, organic buzz and partnerships with companies such as Adidas, Marvel and 7-Eleven — all eager to tap into the company’s cultural cachet and zealous fanbase.
It’s taking that model a step further by launching “Club Zona” on May 5, a $99-a-year subscription program through which super-fans will get early access to limited-edition flavors and exclusive product drops.
It’s marketing by way of community: less about reach, more about resonance.
Keep prices consistent
While inflation and other outside factors have forced competitors to jack up prices, Vultaggio’s savvy has allowed him to tinker with line items and keep AriZona’s iced tea price at a consistent $0.99.
Growing up in Flatbush as the son of an A&P supermarket manager, he worked nearly every rung of the grocery and distribution ladders, even building his own beer delivery service.
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By the time he launched AriZona, when he was in his 40s, he knew how every part of the supply chain worked and how to fine-tune operations and keep his — and customers’ — costs low.
Over the years at AriZona, aluminum has been removed from cans, rail has replaced trucking where possible (and the remaining trucks now drive at night to for better fuel efficiency) and equipment is increasingly built in-house to abate vendor markups.
“If you’re a manufacturer who thinks it’s easy to just pass price along to a consumer,” Vultaggio said, “you’re kidding yourself.”
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