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 <i>garbage</i>. 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 <i>taste like oranges</i>, 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.<p>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.
A local grocery store used to make their own fresh squeezed using a refrigerator sized stainless steel machine that might as well have been a Rube Goldberg machine with its winding metal wire chute full of oranges which led to the squeezing head. That thing was kept right in the aisle next to the refrigerator case they kept the juice in. It was the best orange juice though expensive as it was over 10 bucks a quart when the store finally closed. I tried to call and buy the machine but got nowhere. Turns out the owner died so the family closed up the shop and liquidated it.<p>As for Minute Maid, it has always tasted awful to me and it tasted worse in the 80s. The only packaged OJ I can stand is Tropicana.
A Sam's Club in my area has started selling fresh squeezed orange juice. It's quite delicious. (And yes, it's pricey.) I've looked around at many other stores (including places like Whole Foods) and nobody else seems to be doing this.
Tropicana used to get high marks from me. The only brand I buy in a grocery store is Natalie’s.<p>Fresh squeezed is amazing.
pretty much everywhere in the Netherlands has contraptions like this, small though, not fridge sized. Didn't see orange concentrate anywhere.<p>Minute maid actually tastes better than Tropicana to me (can't stand that brand), been getting one from Spain lately at Costco (Don Simon) that's pretty good, less sweet.
Standard in France and Belgium as well.<p>I have never liked Tropicana or Minute Maid, but about... 30 years ago? We used to have a brand called Fruvita that actually tasted good but it got bought by Tropicana, the taste changed, and we just stopped buying orange juice.
I've always found it pretty scary how some mass-market foods have diverged almost completely from the thing they are actually representing. The weird milky vaguely-citrus flavor of chemical that comes in the box labeled "Orange Juice" is just one of many examples. For another example, go taste a grape and then taste some so-called "grape juice." It's actually mostly apple juice, and doesn't even remotely taste like grapes.
Dark grape juice is made of concord grapes which are the primary variety which is made into jelly, jam, juice, and in general grape flavored things. They don't taste like grocery store eating grapes, they're a different variety.<p>THEY ARE DELICIOUS when you can find them, one of the things I miss about living in California was the brief season you could get a concord grape on the vine to eat. I have never seen them outside a bay area farmer's market, late summer if I remember correctly.
I love concord grapes so much. Im eagerly awaiting their annual return to the farmers market (early September). I love them so much the vendors know to get me and tell me when they are here. I don't understand why the demand for them is small.
I never understood why grape flavored things taste the way they do until I (accidentally) bought Concord grapes.<p>That said, "delicious" is definitely a matter of opinion.
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.<p>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.<p>I might drive down this winter and see if it's still there.
From the store bought orange juices, I think the Trader joes one is the closest to tasting like fresh-squeezed.
Back before Starbucks bought them, Evolution was magical. They sold cold-pressed orange juice in the store that tasted fresh. I lived by that stuff!
It’s the boiling frog problem. Consumers gradually become used to lower quality. 15 years ago, McDonald’s was <i>good</i>. You knew it was bad for you but it was so good that you just didn’t care and it was a great cheat meal. You could get an Angus Delux meal for $7. <a href="https://wealthgang.com/mcdonalds-prices-throughout-the-years/" rel="nofollow">https://wealthgang.com/mcdonalds-prices-throughout-the-years...</a><p>Of course they discontinued the angus burgers that actually used high quality ingredients compared to the McDouble / quarter pounders.<p>Now it’s $12 for a double quarter pounder meal and it tastes like <i>shit</i>. I only notice this because I just didn’t eat there much in the last 15 years. Meat quality and bun quality has clearly gotten worse. I don’t know how they keep growing sales.
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.
This is what happened to me. I would guzzle orange juice. I couldn’t start a day unless I had a giant glass of it. Then I found out that it was just all sugar and not much else. I don’t think I’ve had a glass of the stuff in over a decade.
What if you make fresh squeezed OJ at home, eat the leftover pulp and skins first, and then drink the juice? I wonder if that has the same glycemic impact as eating an orange.
The juice is still much less healthy. It’s the act of having your guts extract the nutrients that makes fruit healthy, because it reduces how quickly your body absorbs it. Once you make it into juice (or a smoothie) by mechanically digesting it prior to consumption, you’ve removed the need for that.
Why not just eat the orange. I can't be the only one who finds eating the pulp alone icky. Like chewing on a damp rag.
Most artificial sweeteners have metabolic side effects, and lead to weight gain.<p>You’re probably better off drinking cane sugar soda because it is more filling than HFCS soda.<p>Anyway orange juice is probably better still. At least it has some vitamin C and maybe trace fiber in it.
no metabolic effects from sweeteners, wish you lot would stop moving the goalposts on why sweeteners are unhealthy:<p><a href="https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC12098100/" rel="nofollow">https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC12098100/</a>
This just in, licorice kills dogs. Once in a while it kills people too. (affects insulin production, and aldosterone causing blood pressure effects then downstream effects on blood potassium and kidneys)
The abstract says the study is useless:<p>> <i>However, given this study applied a heterogeneous ASB formula, it could not adequately consider the role of specific artificial sweeteners. Further research is needed to evaluate the potential effect of different artificial sweeteners and their doses on health.</i>
it's also not the only study, just one example, besides that's standard boilerplate CE so as not to assume liability.
Similar to the reports that talk about health problems with sweeteners. Not enough good data to be informative and actionable.
>Most artificial sweeteners have metabolic side effects, and lead to weight gain.<p>I have not seen a single double blind study show this in the many decades low calorie sweeteners have been consumed (in normal amounts).<p>What I have seen is study after study showing the harms of consuming too many carbohydrates (the amounts contained in normal consumption of juice due to quantity of sugar).
Yes, the way I've heard it put is eating an orange is fine, but drinking a glass of juice is like eating an entire orchard.
Meta: giving oranges as gifts at Christmas was a bit of a thing in the past when they used to be much more rare during winter: from Valencia/Ivrea for Europeans, and California/Florida in the US.<p>* <a href="https://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/why-we-should-bring-back-tradition-christmas-orange-180971101/" rel="nofollow">https://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/why-we-should-br...</a><p>In the US the Interstate system helped reduce shipping and logistic costs across state lines, and so oranges became more prevalent and less 'special' post-WW2.
This reminds me of the collapse of the Gros Michel banana variety, also due to disease. Near-100% loss of a food crop, even a luxury one, is an alarming thing to see though.<p>(I was wondering if climate change would be mentioned, but that doesn't seem to be critical there yet. Starting to be noticed in European grape terroir.)
They mention it as a critical factor, the disease is spread by insects, which is spread by hurricanes. The areas they grow the oranges never used to get hurricanes.<p>> Hurricanes turned out to be a vector for spreading the little winged bug. The wind carried the psyllid all over the state, dropping it off in hundreds of thousands of acres of groves.<p>> It was the perfect storm. And then, of course, there were the actual perfect storms, the high-caliber hurricanes that, before climate change, didn’t come to the Ridge: Irma, Ian, Milton, massive cells, all direct hits on the groves.
Did this banana have seeds!? I've never seen one, but it looks awful. They were actually good?
I never had one, but apperently they tasted much better then the current variety (which IIRC, is in danger of suffering the same fate)<p>IIRC, there was actually a huge marketing push because people wouldn't each the current variety ?<p>PS - the old one didn't go 100% extinct, and you can get small numbers of them from specialty growers. Youtube has videos of people trying them (1)<p>1: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I9ZtvpBoXzI" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I9ZtvpBoXzI</a>
It's not who killed it, it's what killed it and the answer is greed.
For anyone not aware, the most proximate cause of the disappearance of "Florida Orange Juice™ " is the <i>Candidatus Liberibacter asiaticus</i> bacteria. Monoculture is often blamed, but the bacteria affects all citrus trees - oranges, limes, lemons, grapefruits, pomelos, etc.
Fascinating story. I wonder how much the earlier pesticides contributed to the problem. The story mentions it as a thing that was passing, and it makes me curious what would have happened without the pesticides.<p>I'm also curious whether the bugs would survive if you cut down every orange tree in Florida, waited a couple of years, and then planted new groves.
Anita Bryant<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anita_Bryant#/media/File:Anita_Bryant_Sucks_Oranges_button.jpg" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anita_Bryant#/media/File:Anita...</a>
gift link: <a href="https://slate.com/business/2026/04/florida-state-orange-food-houses-real-estate.html?tpcc=giftedarticle" rel="nofollow">https://slate.com/business/2026/04/florida-state-orange-food...</a>
Sugarcane and pineapple used to be the biggest agricultural products in Hawaii. Now they're gone.
Looks like premature collapse of a monoculture due to excess stress, much of it a result of human effort.
It's not monoculture, it's Florida's climate being the perfect environment for the psyllid that causes the disease. California's drier, less humid climate has been more resilient to the bug.
I don't think monoculture is relevant for once; the bacteria affects all citrus trees: oranges, limes, lemons, grapefruits, pomelos, etc.
Yeah, not just one or two susceptible varieties.<p>But when you have <i>nothing but</i> the perfect host for the infection, in incredibly massive proportions as far as the eye can see, a little bacteria goes a long way.<p>Which can be even worse :(
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