A global shortage of oranges that sent prices soaring has prompted some orange juice manufacturers to consider turning to alternative fruits to make the breakfast staple.
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“There are three main factors driving the soaring price of orange juice, and it’s drought, disease and demand,” Ted Jenkin, oXYGen Financial CEO and co-founder, told FOX Business.
The spike stems from declining output in Florida, which is the primary U.S. producer, and disease and extreme weather events in Brazil, which accounts for about 70% of global production.
Orange trees in Brazil have been suffering from a disease known as citrus greening. Once infected, citrus trees produce fruits that are partially green, small, misshapen and bitter. There is no cure, and trees typically die within a few years of infection.
The disease, along with severe heat waves and drought that occurred during the pivotal phases of flowering and early fruit formation, have put Brazil on track to register one of its worst orange harvests in more than three decades, according to a new report published by Fundecitrus and CitrusBR.
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In the past, orange juice makers have avoided long-term shortages by freezing juice stock, which can be preserved and used for up to two years, according to the Financial Times. However, even that frozen stock is dissipating because of a three-year shortage build-up.
Cools said that manufacturers may have to consider using a different fruit, like mandarins, because their trees are more resistant to the greening disease. However, that could be a lengthy process.
The currently sold-in-stores orange juice tastes almost nothing like actual orange juice already.
You have been drinking orange juice, not orange juice. It’s an easy mistake to make.
Orange flavored drink .
The best orange juice I tasted was in Rome at Dunkin Donuts, They squeeze the blood oranges right into a cup for you! 🤤. This was a long time ago.
Orange juice product, made with (drops) of real orange!
Right I have no idea how they make that stuff but I just always assumed it contains little actual orange.
There’s a dirty secret in your glass of orange juice. Even though it says “not from concentrate,” it probably sat in a large vat for up to year with all the oxygen removed from it. This allows it to be preserved and dispensed all year-round. Taking out all the O2 also gets rid of all the flavor. So the juice makers have to add the flavors back in using preformulated recipes full of chemicals called “flavor packs.” Mmm, delicious, fresh-squeezed ethyl-butyrate!
Ecogreenaturalganic 100% GMO-free.
The brand “simply” tastes like fresh squeezed (it also is the proper color and not that Nickelodeon neon orange), but most other brands taste more like Sunny Delight than actual orange juice.
Simply is hella expensive tho.
Only OJ worth buying though.
you gotta try trader joes unpasteurized. nellys is pretty good too. simply rates as fine in my book, but at least its cheap.
Costco orange juice is where it’s at, only thing worth buying
Generic orange juice is a commodified product (ie, you can order a standard 1 tonne of frozen orange juice whenever).
The freezing process destroys a lot of the flavour, so some rind extract is included to bulk up the taste.
Freshly squeezed still has the original flavour, and not the added rind flavour.
(I didn’t look this up, mind, it’s possibly I’ve just repeated an old wives tale!)
can I just use the zester to get some of the acidic bite back into a fresh sqeeuzed thing?
The zest has a very concentrated flavor, but not really any acidity.
However, ook into “super juice” it had a moment in fancy cocktail circles somewhat recently as a way to get more citrus juice from less fruit and also a product that will last longer in the fridge without the taste degrading.
Basically you peel your citrus, mix the peels with some powdered citric and malic acid (the ratio of acids depends on which citrus, I think lemon juice gets straight citric, lime and orange get a mix) and let them sit for a while, the acid pulls some of the oils and such out of the peels making “oleo citrate”, then you blend the oleo citrate and peels with water and strain out the solids and you’re left with something that is nearly identical to actual juice (and you could, of course, mix in the actual juice from the fruits as well)
I feel like there is probably something there you could work with to punch up your juice a bit. Maybe if you’re able to separate out the oleo citrate you could use that as sort of a citrus extract. Or if you just want more acidity and don’t need the flavor enhanced you could just add a bit of acid to the juice.
let me guess, climate change?
Here in Florida there is a disease called citrus greening. The fruit grows small and falls off before it’s ripe. It’s basically destroyed the citrus industry. It’s spread by flying insects so impossible to control and there is no cure.
So climate change doesn’t help but that’s not the main culprit.
Flying insects are not necessarily impossible to control. You can promote the populations of their predators.
The problem is, that usually requires promoting a mixture of amphibians, birds, reptiles, small mammals, and other insects. To do that, you need a habitat full of various plants, trees, and terrains, but vast swathes of land have been turned into dead monoculture, so the predators die out.
That works to mitigate flying insects but you are always going to have some. With citrus greening all you need is one to go from infected tree to uninfected tree and the tree is now fatally infected.
Worse the tree will live for years and the insects spread the bacteria for miles from one infected tree. Florida has spent almost two decades fighting the disease. And lost badly.
Hell even is we had done ruthless culling of any citrus within a large range of and infected tree like we did with citrus canker in the 90s it probably wouldn’t have worked.
We failed to stop canker from spreading and canker only hurt production and made the fruit ugly and suitable only for juice. It was also much easier to manage as it was spread by leaf to leaf contact and via things like stepping on the leaves in one grove and not cleaning your boots before entering another grove.
In 2004 Florida produced 240 million boxes of citrus. Greening was discovered in Miami in 2005. In 2023 Florida produced 16 million boxes.
Predators? That sounds expensive, complicated, and could negatively affect profits.
Can’t we just spray the trees with massive quantities of something cheap and effective like DDT?
Sure, until after several insect generations when many have adapted.
It’s like they say: when you’re making an orange juice you’ve gotta break a few eggs.
that usually requires promoting a mixture of amphibians, birds, reptiles, small mammals, and other insects. To do that, you need a habitat full of various plants, trees, and terrains
So essentially, the opposite of the “modern, mechanized agriculture at scale” that is required to sustain our population’s food requirements.
No wonder we are seeing an insect apocalypse and a bird apocalypse, and a massive decline of all species, and hundreds of extinctions each year…
We’re fucked.
A blight in this case. It’s been happening for a while. I think Arizona’s drier climate is the only place to reliably grow it right now.
If my grade school art teacher was correct, they could take some red cranberry juice and add some yellow lemon juice to get the same result.
Ngl, that actually sounds pretty good
It’s not that far off of a cosmopolitan cocktail in concept
Just needs vodka
right, who cares if it tastes like OJ? long as it’s good it’s good
Cranberry and lemon?
Have you had either, just as they are? Neither are particularly sweet. Biting into a lemon is rarely as refreshing an experience as biting into a ripe sweet orange.
Guess if you added a metric fuckton of sugar it might be palatable, but if I want a want added sugar in my drinks, I’ll have a soda of some sort.
Sugar? You mean, “apple juice”?. Check your juices next time. They’ll never day added sugar. But somehow you always get apple juice.
Depends on the lemon. Get some lemons in the southern part of Spain for example. Those are more closely related to oranges than citrons, and are quite sweet. It’s basically like biting into lemonade.
Neither are particularly sweet.
They don’t have to. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miraculin
…who the fuck bites into an orange?
After it’s sliced or peeled?
How else would you eat it?
Phrasing it like that makes it seem like you’re eating it like an apple
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At that point, just go ahead and add some vodka while you’re there. You’ve got a screwdriver, a cape cod and a vodka lemonade all in one.
Oh how the tables have turned…
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20220627-how-orange-juice-took-over-the-breakfast-table
“The innovation [of concentrated juice] arrived as Florida growers were dealing with cyclical, massive overproduction. The promise of a new way to make juice that could be kept frozen, then reconstituted in people’s homes, prompted them into even more production, however. They ramped up tree planting in the 1940s. The oranges went to frozen concentrate and eventually, to chilled juice, an industry term for the refrigerated product. If juice could be kept in stasis, held in waiting for a consumer’s glass, then the only problem was ramping up demand as much as possible.”
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“It had taken a few decades, but with the help of advertising and processing technology, the dumping ground for extra oranges was solidly ensconced as its own product, far outpacing oranges themselves in sales.”
It isn’t just ’ freezing juice stock’, really that hasn’t been the way things have been done in a long time.
JuicePaks from givaudan have been normalized since maybe the '80’s.
Consumers expect orange juice to taste like ‘orange juice’, year round, whether it was a good or bad year. There isn’t anything intrinsically bad about that anymore than expecting bananas to taste like Cavendish.
The world is changing though, and tastes will have to adapt.
It’s raspberry jam all over again!
Only in America is overabundance a problem to solve
“My God. The Dukes are going to corner the entire frozen orange juice market!”
Isn’t that just fruit juice, then?
No it’s still juice that is orange, just not juice from an orange.
The sources are a CEO and FOX Business? Yeah that doesn’t mean anything to me, hoss.
There is no cure, and trees typically die within a few years of infection.
Molecular biologists could make tree that won’t get infected. Until ecoactivists like Greenpeace will come and uproot the trees.
