‘99¢ Still Matters’: AriZona’s Billionaire Founder Is Still Committing to $0.99 a Can Despite Absorbing Over $40 Million to Keep the Can Affordable

Almost exactly a year ago, the billionaire who has kept a can of iced tea at $0.99 for decades sat down with TODAY and was asked whether the price was finally going up.

"Right now, no. We have no plan to do it," AriZona founder Don Vultaggio said on Aug. 21, 2025. "We're trying to hold the line.”

Seven months later, AriZona went further. In March 2026, the company published a blog post entitled "Why is AriZona Iced Tea Still 99¢?" that effectively put the promise in writing again. AriZona called the price a "visible commitment to value" and said protecting it means "working harder behind the scenes, operating smarter, and absorbing pressure whenever possible so our customers do not have to."

That matters because the pressure Vultaggio was talking about in August 2025 had not disappeared. It was aluminum.

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In that same TODAY interview, Vultaggio laid out his figures. AriZona's cans were costing him about 40% more, and on a purchase of more than 100 million pounds of aluminum a year, he was absorbing roughly $40 million rather than passing it on. About 20% of that metal comes from Canada, and while most of what the company buys is recycled in the United States, he said that 100% of the supply was being affected by the tariff-driven repricing.

His reason for eating it was not complicated.

"I can kind of tighten my belt, because the people I service and the customers of mine, they're tightening their belt every day," he told TODAY. "I grew up in Brooklyn, and I worked for $1 an hour. I respect the value of $1."

Vultaggio gave the commercial version in the same conversation: He would rather grow volume than raise prices. Both things can be true at once, which is why the decision is defensible to a business as well as flattering to a founder.

The March 2026 blog post fills in something the interview did not: Exactly how AriZona has managed to make that strategy work for so long.

The company says modern “Big Cans” use roughly 40% less aluminum than earlier versions. The company also now works with multiple can suppliers instead of relying on a single factory. Much of its product runs through its own New Jersey facility, capable of producing as many as 1,500 cans per minute. Company trucks make overnight deliveries to avoid traffic and reduce transportation costs. AriZona also noted that the price of high-fructose corn syrup has tripled over time, representing another roughly $30 million in costs that the company has absorbed rather than directly passing through to consumers.

There is another unusually important line item: advertising.

AriZona has deliberately avoided the massive traditional advertising budgets common among beverage companies, instead treating the Big Can itself as the advertisement. Vultaggio has described each can as a "billboard," with the oversized package and loud design doing the work that competitors might pay television networks, celebrities, and advertising agencies to accomplish. That keeps another layer of overhead from finding its way into the shelf price.

In other words, $0.99 is not simply Vultaggio deciding each morning that he can afford to make less money. AriZona has spent decades engineering significant portions of the business around keeping that number viable.

Now, the arithmetic.

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The tariff Vultaggio was reacting to was Proclamation 10947, signed June 3, 2025, doubling duties on aluminum and steel imports from 25% to 50% the following day. But a 50% tariff on roughly a fifth of his supply does not mechanically produce a 40% increase in can cost, and that gap is where every other outlet stopped.

The answer is that the underlying metal is not what moved the most.

LME aluminum ran from about $2,638 a tonne in early February 2025 to $3,186.50 on Aug. 20, 2026, up roughly 21%, a smaller move than copper's record run above $11,350 a tonne.

What repriced violently was the Midwest Premium, the surcharge on physical metal delivered in the United States. It sat around $.020 a pound through 2024; by late January 2026, it had passed $1 a pound for the first time on record. That premium applies regardless of where the metal was smelted, which is why Vultaggio could say all of his supply was affected even though most of it is recycled domestically.

Run his own figure through it: $40 million over 100 million pounds is about $0.40 a pound of extra cost. The Midwest Premium rose roughly $0.79 a pound over the same span.

His 40% claim is not only supportable, but may also understate what the spot market did. A company buying on contract does not absorb the spot move immediately. The reconciliation lands in his favor, which is not necessarily the result the arithmetic was expected to produce.

The March 2026 blog post makes the timing more interesting. After months of tariff pressure and warnings that the famous price might finally have to move, AriZona was still publicly reaffirming its $0.99 price in March 2026. It described affordability as part of how the company defines itself and said its operating system was specifically designed to absorb rising costs without breaking the promise printed on the can.

Two things have changed since then.

The tariff regime was layered again in 2026, including changes to how certain aluminum and steel products are treated and a reduction in the threshold for qualifying as effectively American-made metal content from 95% to 85%. Then, on Aug. 20, 2026, the September Midwest Premium fell 8.2% to $0.95 a pound on reports that Washington is preparing additional relief for Canadian metal.

Nothing is finalized. But for the first time since Vultaggio made the pledge, one of the most important numbers underneath it is moving the other way.

The figure that makes the whole thing land is one he rarely mentions.

$0.99 in 1992, carried forward on the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) Consumer Price Index to July 2026, is $2.36. On the narrower index for nonalcoholic beverages it is $2.06. Either way, the can sells for somewhere between 42% and 48% of what three decades of inflation would imply.

And it is not quite the same can.

AriZona moved from a 23-ounce to a 22-ounce container in early 2023 by redesigning the lid to use less aluminum. That is the honest asterisk on one of the United States' longest-running price freezes. The company's own March 2026 post also points to packaging efficiency as part of the equation, saying advances in can technology have cut aluminum usage by roughly 40% compared with earlier versions.

The listed comparison is thin. On Coca-Cola's (KO) April 2026 earnings call, CFO John Murphy said the company's own aluminum exposure was manageable and that its bottlers carried more of it, while neither Coca-Cola's or PepsiCo's (PEP) most recent calls mention aluminum at all.

The customer Vultaggio says he is protecting is visibly strained. Walmart (WMT) just posted its slowest U.S. sales growth in six years.

AriZona is private, which is both why Vultaggio can hold the line and why nobody outside the company can audit how long he can. Forbes estimates Vultaggio and his family's net worth at $6.4 billion as of Aug. 27, 2026.

But the March 2026 post changes the evidence slightly.

In August 2025, Vultaggio said he was "trying to hold the line." By March 2026, AriZona was still telling customers the line was part of the company's identity, and it laid out the manufacturing, logistics, packaging, and marketing decisions designed to keep it there.

What would break the promise is visible enough: aluminum prices, the Midwest Premium, tariff policy, and AriZona's can-sheet contract renewals.

As of this week, one of those pressures is finally moving in the right direction.

While there hasn't been another update in recent months, it seems like AriZona continues to hold onto the dream of keeping the $0.99 can alive. However, more and more reports online suggest retailers aren't honoring the $0.99 price tag, opting to sell their AriZona cans for higher prices to increase profits.