What's Really In Your Orange Juice?

Oh, the lies we tell ourselves so that we can sleep at night. You see, I've recently found out that I've been living a lie. Well, not a whole lie, but half a lie, which means half a truth, which makes me half the man I thought I was. This realization started with the latest radical raving from my friend Gary, who lives on the Lower East Side, where conspiracy theories just so happen to grow just like orange groves do in Florida, about how my beloved Tropicana juice wasn't just juice. I didn't believe it, but just to be sure, I opened up my fridge, looked at the container, smiled at the reassuring image of the straw poking into an orange, and read the words "100% pure Florida orange juice," as I had hundreds of times before. And I said to myself, "Oh, Gary."

But a few weeks later, a little voice inside me said that Gary is often right in his ravings, and that maybe I should look into what he said. I did. You, can too. It's all over the Internet—for what that's worth.

Let's start with the obvious: oranges only grow in certain seasons, and because orange juice goes bad after a short period of time, orange juice providers had to come up with a way of storing the juice if they weren't going to go with the old school method of freezing juice in concentrate. What they came up with is a process called "deaeration," in which the oranges are picked, the oranges are squeezed, the juice is heated to eliminate bacteria, and then the juice is kept in vast, zillion-gallon tanks from which oxygen is eliminated. This allows the juice to not spoil for up to a year. The downside to this process is that the juice loses its taste, so when the juice is ready to be packaged for consumption, flavor packets are added to give it its consistent, "pure," orangey taste. Fragrance companies responsible for the same formulas used for perfumes come up with the right taste concoctions that you and I know as orange juice.

These rather stunning revelations come from Alissa Hamilton, who published the book Squeezed: What You Don't Know About Orange Juice in 2009. Her scandalous tell-all might seem like it had the potential for creating a Juicegate, but the book came and went without putting much of a dent into the Big Juice Guys. And, anyway, the process delineated above is pretty much corroborated by Tropicana's very own website, which cheerfully breaks it all down from "grove to glass." They're hiding in plain sight!

This process certainly explains why every carton of Tropicana OJ tastes exactly the same. It also explains why Tropicana juice tastes different in different countries—because Tropicana modifies the flavor packets to the popular taste preferences of different regions. It's also why Minute Maid's Pure Squeezed orange juice tastes different—they use different flavor packets. Did you catch that? It's called "pure squeezed," which sounds a whole lot like fresh squeezed, but it's not. Which brings us to the most important point of all: haven't you ever wondered why a fresh squeezed glass of OJ tastes so different from these "pure" orange juices? It's the process, stupid.

I'm not mad at you. I'm mad at myself. I never wondered why.

The juice industry is big. Tropicana, which is owned by Pepsi, generated $6.2 billion in revenue last year. This is a money-making behemoth. PepsiCo Global Beverages Chief Massimo D'Amore didn't mince words when he was interviewed by Bloomberg Businessweek earlier this month. "We have lost perspective here on the primary reason we are in business, which is to make money," D'Amore said. I bet D'Amore sits at his desk and smokes those flavor packets rolled in $100 bills, while making his billions.