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> any company pay to add massive amounts of chemicals to something to give it a taste that it has naturally?

Unless they plan on selling the juice just during harvest time, they need to store it. Try and store some juice you squeezed from oranges even in the refrigerator and see how long it will last and how it will taste. It will last some but not for 6 months.

Consistency. Tropicana tastes one way, others taste different. I don't know why you need any proof, products will change flavor after they are stored for a while.

> add massive amounts of chemicals to something to give it

I'll have to throw the "sauce, please" back at you here ;-) I don't see where in the article it says these flavor packs are massive. Flavor compounds if done right will not be massive. Have you ever added spices or vanilla to anything you cook or bake. How much of the total volume is it? It usually isn't much.

> No proof is provided of this assertion.

I think it is rather common sense that it would lose flavor, at best it would have a different / strange flavor.

> hardly something to feel alarm about.

Really, you don't have any idea why someone might be a slightly worried about this class of additives put into a popular food that gets to skirt by regulations based on "technical" language.

Yes but what if you store it after removing the oxygen? And just the oxygen. It might last a lot longer. Then put it back at the end and taste it.

Industrial companies have a lot of resources and techniques available to them that the typical person making juice in their home does not. For example, what if they pasteurize the juice? Then it might also last longer, etc.

Some people react negatively to these sorts of scientific techniques out of what seems to be the naturalistic fallacy, a sort of (mistaken) belief that "natural things" (whatever that means) are intrinsically better.

There's no such thing as "take out all the oxygen". You can take a bunch, but after a point it get's hard and expensive to keep reducing oxygen concentrations to super low (not zero) levels.

Yes - presumably the goal is to reduce the dissolved oxygen levels low enough to halt or significantly slow whatever decay process affects the taste.

>I think it is rather common sense

Common sense is not proof.

>Flavor compounds if done right will not be massive. Have you ever added spices or vanilla to anything you cook or bake. How much of the total volume is it? It usually isn't much.

Then it's not a problem

I hate this mentality. Why does it have to be proved to be sure it is unhealthy? It should be the other way around. It has to be proved to be healthy for you to eat it.

Back in the day, smoking wasn't proved that it was unhealthy while it was common sense that it was.

The mentality is not accidental, it is a cornerstone element in propaganda related to health and environmental concerns.

It used by oil companies, agro-businesses, and other industries, and of course tobacco companies. As part of their campaigns over the years they have instilled those ideas pretty well at at fundamental level in everyone's minds specifically that:

1) Stuff is safe unless we have hard scientific evidence that it is not

2) One should not interfere with or harass big companies too much, because if you hurt them it will hurt the economy. They know what they are doing, are smarter, have better scientists and in general are mature enough to police themselves.

3) Only conspiracy theory people, hippies, and communists worry about health and mother earth, those people are irrational and crazy. You don't want to be like them. You want to be an American.

When consumers would say "we'd like to label explicitly this and that", or "this seems unhealthy, we should probably disallow its usage in food" the reply is "Where is your sauce? Do you have hard science? No? Ok then we are a rational science based society so we should allow it".

It is a very effective tactic in general and no wonder it is used all the time.

Hearing my own thoughts when I'm reading your comment. Cheers for writing it down in clear english!

Sure, frozen/stored food will lose some flavours, change some others, but the article says it's "quite flavourless", which seems like a bit stronger claim.

Next time I juice fresh oranges--and if I remember--I will freeze some, just to see what happens :) Especially interested if it'll taste more like the stuff we get from the shop here (which is nearly all "from concentrate").

As I recall reconstituted and concentrated juices are supposed to have "Brix" ratings on the food labels.

To complicate the matter further, juices that are concentrated for preservation, handling and storage and reconstituted for consumption (labelled "juice from concentrate") should be diluted back to approximately the same solids level (designated as Brix or percent soluble solids) of the initial juice. The amount of add-back water can vary substantially even within a given fruit, so reasonable commercial standards are set (FDA, 1999)

Juice is a pretty loaded word with lots of meanings. The tables in this document might help: http://www.fao.org/docrep/005/y2515e/y2515e03.htm

Why? For two reasons:

1) flavor. When you buy this brand of juice it taste this way

2) flavor consistency. No matter which field or time of year the can produce the same flavor.