The other thing that I can't help but think has seriously hurt the industry is that, between concentrate and flavor packs, almost all supermarket orange juice tastes like garbage. Fresh-squeezed orange juice is, of course, the benchmark. If you ever taste Minute Maid back-to-back with fresh-squeezed, well, you probably won't be buying Minute Maid again any time soon. It just doesn't even taste like oranges. There are a few brands available (the expensive ones, of course) that do come close enough to actually taste like oranges, but when the mass-market product falls that far down in quality, you can't help but wonder how anyone still wants to buy it.
The process to make never concentrated orange juice logistically viable involves removing all the oxygen from the juice so it stores well. Now you can take a seasonal product like oranges and sell the juice the entire year around. Unfortunately removing the oxygen also removes most of the flavor. so what the bottlers do is add an engineered "flavor package" when they bottle the juice to add the flavor back.
I am halfway convinced that flavor wise frozen concentrated orange juice is "closer to the tree" than the "never concentrated" stuff. Nothing on fresh squeezed. But that is the price we pay to have a non-seasonal product.
It was a sad day for me when I realized that a glass of orange juice(or any juice in general) isn't much better for your health than a can of soda and probably even worse than diet/zero coke.
I love cutting grapefruit in half and digging out chunks because at the end you get to drink grapefruit juice the way it was intended, as a reward for eating grapefruit.
The other thing that I can't help but think has seriously hurt the industry is that, between concentrate and flavor packs, almost all supermarket orange juice tastes like garbage. Fresh-squeezed orange juice is, of course, the benchmark. If you ever taste Minute Maid back-to-back with fresh-squeezed, well, you probably won't be buying Minute Maid again any time soon. It just doesn't even taste like oranges. There are a few brands available (the expensive ones, of course) that do come close enough to actually taste like oranges, but when the mass-market product falls that far down in quality, you can't help but wonder how anyone still wants to buy it.
The process to make never concentrated orange juice logistically viable involves removing all the oxygen from the juice so it stores well. Now you can take a seasonal product like oranges and sell the juice the entire year around. Unfortunately removing the oxygen also removes most of the flavor. so what the bottlers do is add an engineered "flavor package" when they bottle the juice to add the flavor back.
I am halfway convinced that flavor wise frozen concentrated orange juice is "closer to the tree" than the "never concentrated" stuff. Nothing on fresh squeezed. But that is the price we pay to have a non-seasonal product.
I haven't had minute maid in a long time, but I enjoy Simply, and Sam's club house brand is pretty good as well.
Nothing like a fresh Florida orange, though. I used to know a secret tree in a public preserve that had the best oranges known to man.
I might drive down this winter and see if it's still there.
It may surprise you to learn that Simply Beverages is owned by Coca-Cola, who also own Minute Maid.
Simply is definitely the superior of their product lines.
It was a sad day for me when I realized that a glass of orange juice(or any juice in general) isn't much better for your health than a can of soda and probably even worse than diet/zero coke.
Most artificial sweeteners have metabolic side effects, and lead to weight gain.
You’re probably better off drinking cane sugar soda because it is more filling than HFCS soda.
Anyway orange juice is probably better still. At least it has some vitamin C and maybe trace fiber in it.
I love cutting grapefruit in half and digging out chunks because at the end you get to drink grapefruit juice the way it was intended, as a reward for eating grapefruit.
Do you eat the seeds and poop them out somewhere nice? I think that’s what the grapefruit intended.
gift link: https://slate.com/business/2026/04/florida-state-orange-food...
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