Leading orange juice companies like Tropicana, Minute Maid and Simply Orange tell us many stories about orange juice: it’s natural, it’s pure and simple, it’s squeezed from oranges grown on pristine-looking trees in Florida. They just leave out the details about how most commercial orange juice is produced and processed. Considering roughly two-thirds of U.S. households buy orange juice, Americans have the right to the whole story. So, it’s time for a reality check. In the 1980s Tropicana coined the phrase “not from concentrate” to distinguish its pasteurized orange juice from the cheaper reconstituted “from concentrate” juice. The idea was to convince consumers that pasteurized orange juice is a fresher, overall better product and therefore worth the higher price. It worked. Over the next five years sales of Tropicana’s pasteurized juice doubled and profits almost tripled. In fact, “not from concentrate” (a.k.a pasteurized orange juice) is not more expensive than “from concentrate” because it's closer to fresh squeezed. Rather, it's because storing full strength pasteurized orange juice is more costly and elaborate than storing the space saving concentrate from which “from concentrate” is made. The technology of choice at the moment is aseptic storage, which involves stripping the juice of oxygen, a process known as “deaeration,” so it doesn’t oxidize in the million gallon tanks in which it can be kept for upwards of a year. When the juice is stripped of oxygen it's also stripped of flavor-providing chemicals. That's why juice companies hire flavor and fragrance companies, the same ones that formulate perfumes, to engineer flavor packs to add back to the juice to make it taste fresh. Flavor packs resemble nothing found in nature, instead containing high amounts of ethyl butyrate, a chemical in the fragrance of fresh squeezed orange juice. So if you want that fresh squeezed taste, pick up a carton that contains Florida Valencia juice that hasn't spent months in storage. The rest of the year, whether you buy Minute Maid’s “from concentrate,” or Tropicana’s “not from concentrate,” you’re drinking a mixture of Florida juice, some or all of which has been stored from previous seasons, as well as juice shipped from Brazil.
