It worked. As the California sugar industry grew in size and importance, Spreckels became a well-known name in branded sugar. In the late 1960's, after 50+ years on grocers' shelves, the Spreckels name disappeared, following the company's purchase by the American Sugar Co., which turned Spreckels into a manufacturer of private label sugar for the house brands of West Coast grocery chains such as Albertson's, Von's, Ralph's, and Safeway.

In 1987, Spreckels management organized a leveraged buyout and decided to revive the brand name on the West Coast. But, says Tom Fritz, marketing manager, Spreckels Sugar Co., the company knew that re-entering what is essentially a commodity market-one containing established and private label brands-would be difficult without some kind of value-added feature to differentiate the brand.

"It's very hard in any business to gain a foothold these days without spending a great deal of money, and we knew we had to offer some value to the consumer and to the trade to get them to accept our product."

To help with the reintroduction of the brand, Spreckels turned to the RAM Group, an Oakland-based marketing and sales organization whose subsidiary, Vista Marketing Research, supplied research services. Tom McCarty, managing director, Vista Marketing Research, says that the research focused on finding a way to make the product stand out in the minds of consumers.

"There were already price brands and established brands on the market. We knew that Spreckels couldn't just go on the shelf with the same product, it would get clobbered. The world doesn't need another bag of sugar. So the question when we started was, how can we make a better product?"

The answer to that question turned out to be packaging. A year of intense testing and research- including several rounds of one-on-one interviews in which consumers expressed satisfaction with sugar itself but compla...