Townsend’s New York Observer

by Marcus A. Cohen

Commercially Processed Orange Juice: How Fresh And Pure?

For the past 30 years, Minute Maid and Tropicana, among other premium brands, have been adding flavor packs to produce the pasteurized orange juice that an estimated two-thirds of Americans drink at breakfast every day.

Widespread use of flavor packs in orange juice touted on the carton as “100 percent pure” or “not from concentrate” forces consideration of not only how “pure” but just how “fresh” that glass of orange juice so many Americans down daily. (The “not from concentrate” brands made their appearance on market shelves in the 1980s to differentiate them from bottled concentrates and frozen juice.)

It turns out that after being picked from trees, oranges are shipped to be squeezed and pasteurized; then, if not headed for frozen concentrate, the squeezed product is put in aseptic storage. This involves removing oxygen from the product in a process called deaeration, which enables the producers to store the “deaerated” liquid in million-gallon tanks for as long as a year. The flavor packs are added just before packaging and shipping to compensate for the loss of aroma and taste during deaeration. Different brands use different packs to give their now jazzed-up juice its consistent, unique taste.

What’s amiss in this process? The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) apparently regards the flavor packs as essentially harmless. But consider how “100 percent pure” orange juice appears to taste fresh all year round, as though oranges never go out of season.

In the book Squeezed: What You Don’t Know About Orange Juice (Yale University Press, 2009) author Alissa Hamilton says that if one were to taste the juice coming out of these tanks, it would taste like pure sugar water, not orange juice.

(Hamilton holds a BA in literature and a PhD in environmental studies from Yale. She also possesses a JD from the University of Toronto’s Faculty of Law, and was a 2008–2009 Food and Society Policy Fellow with the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy.)

Hamilton points out that because deaeration removes the natural essences and nutrients that give truly fresh orange juice its flavor, juice companies hire flavor and fragrance companies – the same companies that formulate perfumes for Dior and Calvin Klein – to add substances to the juice to make it taste as though it came straight from fresh-squeezed oranges.

Flavor packs differ some for each company, but all packs are made from a combination of mixed and matched chemical flavorings. Most companies, including those within international markets, have their own trademark flavor of choice.

In the US, manufacturers of these packs emphasize high amounts of ethyl butyrate. (Ethyl butyrate can be found in a variety of foods, including alcoholic beverages, chewing gum, and as a solvent in perfumes. Such chemicals need not be listed on cartons of premium orange juice.) The orange juice industry acknowledges that these flavor packs, whether made for pasteurized or reconstituted orange juice, resemble nothing found in nature.

In a report by ABC News (Dec. 16, 2011), Kristen Gunter, executive director of the Florida Citrus Processors Association, confirmed that commercially processed orange juice is blended and stored, with flavor packs added before the juice is shipped to stores. Gunter explained that flavor packs are created from volatile compounds that escape from oranges during pasteurization. Pasteurization, Gunter continued, not only makes the juice safe, it stabilizes the juice, which separates in a fresh state. (Gunter noted that nonpasteurized orange juice must be labeled as such, with warnings about potential pathogens. These regulations have been in place since the FDA mandated them in 1963, she said.)

A Little History

Early Spanish explorers planted the first orange trees around St. Augustine in the 1500s. Florida sunshine provided the trees with a perfect environment, inspiring Floridians to plant more. The state’s subtropical climate and plentiful rainfall helped grow the juiciest oranges available, and the first orange grove appeared in 1830 on Merritt Island.

Hamilton traces the history of commercially processed orange juice in the US to the early 1900s, remarking that the first canned juice was said to taste like “battery acid.” World War II ushered in the age of palatable processed orange juice, with the military seeking a source of vitamin C that soldiers would readily consume. In 1948, frozen concentrate was born, too late for the war effort but in time to help revive an ailing citrus industry, which was struggling with a surplus of fruit.

Bing Crosby, crooning about Minute Maid in radio ads, helped orange juice on its way to becoming America’s favorite breakfast drink. Since then, the citrus industry and its technologies have changed. What has remained constant? Marketing – some of it deceptive, says Hamilton. Orange juice, commercially processed, with the addition of flavor packs, isn’t what it’s portrayed to be. Consumers have a right to know what they are consuming, Hamilton says.

Leading orange juice companies such as Tropicana (owned by PepsiCo), Minute Maid and Simply Orange (owned by Coca-Cola), and Florida’s Natural tell us many stories about orange juice: it’s natural, it’s pure, it’s squeezed from oranges grown on pristine-seeming trees in Florida. But they leave out the details about how most commercial orange juice is produced and processed. Considering that roughly two thirds of US households buy orange juice, Hamilton believes that Americans have a right to the whole story. I agree.

Trends In The Orange Juice Industry

Most orange juice comes now from Brazil. Until a few years ago, one could count on “Pure Premium” from Tropicana being from Florida, but shipping technology has advanced. Companies like Tropicana have started shipping full-strength juice from Brazil rather than buying and squeezing in Florida. The majority of not-from-concentrate is coming from Florida-squeezed oranges, but that’s changing. Orange growing is moving to Brazil, which grows the most oranges for juice by far. (Also, in Brazil land is cheaper, and environmental regulations concerning fungicides and pesticides are almost nonexistent.) Meanwhile, the Florida groves are dwindling, being turned over in favor of condominiums.

The FDA recently detained imported orange juice shipments after samples from Brazil and Canada tested positive for a banned fungicide. Eleven of 80 orange juice shipments contained concentrations of 10 parts per billion or higher, the FDA claimed. Nine shipments were detained while manufacturers of two other shipments voluntarily halted imports. (The agency began holding and testing imported juice after low levels of the compound carbendazim was detected in trace amounts in products from Brazil. Carbendazim is banned in use in US oranges and has been linked to liver tumors in animals.)

According to the US Department of Agriculture, Americans consumed 1.2 million gallons from the 2009–2010 growing season. Today, most orange juice sold in the US is a mix of domestic and imported product, according to the Juice Products Association. The US is the biggest single importer of orange juice and took in 190,000 metric tons last year, US Department of Agriculture data show.

Lawsuit Challenges Tropicana’s Claim That Its Orange Juice Is Natural

An ABC.com news story says that a California mother has alleged in a lawsuit in early 2012 that Tropicana’s from-concentrate Pure Premium juice is not a “natural” product. Her class-action suit filed in US District Court, Eastern District of California, alleges that the addition of aromas and flavor packs “changes the essential nature” of the juice.

If the class action moves forward, the lawsuit would represent anyone in the nation who had bought Tropicana Pure Premium, which is made by Tropicana Products, a division of Purchase, N.Y.-based PepsiCo Inc.

The lawsuit cites the packaging of the Pure Premium brand, “an illustration of an orange with a straw stuck into it, which is meant to convey the message that [not-from-concentrate] juice is fresh from the orange. This reinforces the ‘100 percent Pure and Natural Orange Juice’ claim in large prominent type.”

“It is not natural orange juice,” according to the complaint. “It is instead a product that is scientifically engineered in laboratories, not nature, which explains its shelf-life of more than two months.”

Tropicana holds about 40% of the market share of all orange juice sold each year and had worldwide retail sales of about $5 billion in 2010, according to the lawsuit. On its website, Tropicana boasts that each 59-ounce container of Pure Premium has “16 fresh-picked oranges squeezed into it.”

The lawsuit comes on the heels of news that trace amounts of carbendazim were detected in Minute Maid orange juice and juices of some of its competitors. The juices in question were made of oranges imported from Brazil, where that fungicide is legal, and Coca Cola alerted the FDA that the trees had been sprayed with the chemical. The FDA found no chemicals in Tropicana brands and the company has subsequently said it will use only Florida oranges going forward.

The FDA does not require companies to add flavor packs to the labels of pasteurized juice (which includes the from-concentrate as well as the not-from-concentrate versions), according to the citrus industry.

As for claims of being a natural product, an FDA spokesperson commented; “The FDA has never defined the term, ‘natural.’ However, we don’t object to its use if it is truthful and not misleading.”

Marcus A. Cohen’s “baptism” in the whirlpools of medical politics dates to 1984, when he served as government and media liaison for patients under alternative cancer therapy. Subsequently, he has advocated broadening plausible treatment options for patients unresponsive to conventional care. A Townsend Letter columnist since 2004, he has reported and commented on a wide range of health-care topics; he is also the author of a paperback, Lyme Disease Update, published by the Lyme Disease Association in 2004.