Welch’s, the maker of jams, juices and jellies, has shaken up its marketing in recent years, enacting a rebrand in 2024 and experimenting with more millennial-friendly activations like a rosé truck and bodega speakeasy. With its latest holiday campaign, the farmer-owned brand is looking back to its past, tapping into a nostalgia craze that has taken over CPG marketing while adding some modern bells and whistles.
For the first time in a quarter century, Welch’s creative will star a kid character, though the media strategy extends well beyond the TV commercials of yore. “Break Out the Fancy Juice” centers on a precocious, bowtie-sporting spokesperson named Charlie Cheersman (10-year-old Paxton Beau Bazile) as he highlights occasions large and small for cracking open a bottle of Welch’s Sparkling Juices, like nailing the family Christmas photo. Welch’s recently overhauled its sparkling portfolio, reinvesting in a production line at a Lawton, Michigan, facility and reformulating its apple cider flavor into a Crisp Apple variant boasting improved taste.
The largest marketing effort to date supporting Welch’s decade-old sparkling offerings, “Break Out the Fancy Juice” launches Tuesday across TV, digital, social, retail media, sampling and in-person experiences, with plans to leverage Charlie Cheersman for future seasons, such as summer 2026. The return to kid-focused advertising after over two decades comes in response to an existing consumer sentiment Welch’s previously underleveraged, according to executives.
“Nostalgia is probably the No. 1 thing that people talk about. We’ve seen it in our internal brand equity studies,” said Katelyn Nugent, head of integrated marketing and communications at Welch’s. “I think we had gotten away from maybe tapping into the resonance that [nostalgia] drives for consumers.”
Passing the baton
Other CPGs have employed a similar playbook to generate emotional resonance. Life, the cereal marketed by Quaker, last year revived Mikey, a picky eater associated with the iconic “Mikey likes it” tagline from the 1970s. Welch’s is taking a multiphased approach to reacclimating consumers to creative anchored around an adolescent.
The brand has been teeing up the debut of Charlie with social videos reminiscing about Welch’s last child star (Emily Mae Young), who appeared in TV spots in the ‘90s espousing the sippable quality and lip-smacking flavor of Welch’s grape juices (“Who remembers this girl from the Welch’s commercials?” reads an Instagram post Welch’s shared earlier this month). Welch’s has since tried to broaden its image beyond historic ties to Concord grapes, hence the rebrand last year. The Sparkling Juices lineup includes non-grape flavors like Passion Fruit Mango, Strawberry and Crisp Apple.
By stoking memories of Young online, Welch’s is creating a baton pass to Charlie, who’s a bit older and was designed to be fully integrated into all aspects of the campaign, including retail media and experiential marketing. Welch’s now typically invests 55% to 60% of its working media budgets on retail media networks, Nugent estimated.
On the experience front, the brand will pop up at holiday markets in six cities for “Break Out the Fancy Juice,” including Phoenix, Denver, Salt Lake City, Boston, New York and Portland, Oregon. Charlie will lead social content promoting those in-person activations, and may make a guest appearance at select locations.
“We knew that [TV] couldn’t be the only place he popped up. The power of the Charlie Cheersman character is his deeper storytelling,” said Nugent.
“Break Out the Fancy Juice” also shows Welch’s continuing to experiment with influencers, which only started to factor into its marketing about 14 months ago, according to Nugent. Legacy CPG brands broadly have embraced more influencer- and social-first tactics as they look to connect with young consumers who have cut the cord on linear TV.
“We’re still in our nascent stages of testing [influencer marketing], but we’ve seen enormous reaction, and frankly, that’s where a lot of those comments around nostalgia come in,” said Nugent. “We’re testing and learning our way in, but it continues to be a bigger channel that we’re looking at in terms of investment.”
A new phase for Welch’s marketing
Welch’s festive campaign was developed with an integrated agency team (IAT) made up of Terri & Sandy on creative, Flywheel on paid media, Matter Communications on PR and Superdigital on social, influencers and brand activations. Enlisting several agency partners follows Welch’s shift off of a single agency of record model after Fitzco handled its rebrand.
“I would say this Sparkling campaign isn’t our first, but definitely is our best-in-class in terms of leveraging the power of the IAT,” said Nugent.
The evolving approach to marketing services follows a larger shakeup in Welch’s top ranks. The brand in July named Cees Talma, former chief executive of Nature’s Way, as its CEO, succeeding Trevor Bynum. CMO Scott Utke, who worked on “Break Out the Fancy Juice,” departed the CPG earlier this month. Welch’s on Oct. 15 appointed former Nature’s Way CMO Andrew Hartshorn to the newly created position of chief brand and innovation officer, which effectively fills the former CMO slot.
Hartshorn is focused on getting new ideas to market faster and shoring up Welch’s brand storytelling. While it’s still too early to tell what the full impact of these changes will be, Nugent cited the potential for greater innovation in the ways Welch’s shows up for consumers. The over 150-year-old brand already has big ambitions for 2026, including tying Sparkling Juices closer to the summer season through Charlie and celebrating America’s 250th anniversary.
“We know more and more sales are coming through online channels than brick and mortar,” said Nugent. “How we continue to leverage that digital storytelling with the point of sale I think would be critical as we head into the next phase of our brand.”
