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Comment by exmadscientist | Hacker News Reader

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 garbage. 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 taste like oranges, 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.

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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.

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.

Is it really non-seasonal any longer now that there are reliable international markets in southern hemisphere to support?

I mean, they don't get teleported to the point of sale so most of the rules still apply to long distance shipping.

As a chemical engineer we study the process for making frozen concentrate orange juice (FCOJ). IIRC you feed the juice into low pressure flash distillation that splits off most of the water. Problem is that many of the volatile compounds go out the top as well, and the resulting concentrate is blah. So you feed back in about 10% raw juice, pack the sludge in cans and freeze em.

The fun part was trying to find good estimates for viscosity for the two phase orange sludge in order to properly size the piping and pumps. Treating food products like chemical production is its own weird sub-specialty.

Salutes on the post. After hearing the flavor tricks they have to jump through to make "never concentrate" I was sort of hoping the freezing process of FCO kept more of the original flavor. But it sounds like it does not.

The industrialization of food is really what enables our modern way of life. But it slightly horrifies me every time I learn more about it.

"Cold pressed" seems to be what you want for keeping flavor. All the good supermarket juices are cold pressed.

Couldn't they keep the aromatics, as they would be the first to come over, and then add them back?

Those get captured and sold separately.

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.

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 never understood why grape flavored things taste the way they do until I (accidentally) bought Concord grapes.

That said, "delicious" is definitely a matter of opinion.

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 also deeply miss the limes. The halfway-to-yellow actually ripened limes that didn't even show up some years.

If I knew for sure when they would be available I'd certainly make a trip across the country to eat those limes.

Those lines are just hanging out on the trees around for most of the year! Best storage for citrus is on the tree.

Concord grapes are pretty common in season in New York State, and I’m assuming the states nearby.

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.

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.

pretty much everywhere in the Netherlands has contraptions like this, small though, not fridge sized. Didn't see orange concentrate anywhere.

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.

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.

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.

Fresh squeezed is amazing.

Or you can buy a citrus juicer and make it yourself. A couple or three oranges and a few seconds in the morning.

OXO Good Grips runs about $20, it's a squeeze-by-hand option. You can get a wooden reamer, or spend about or upwards of a Franklin for something complicated, though I find simpler is saner.

I have both an old school glass dish reamer as well as a wooden reamer. Use it for making lemon/lime iced tea (using actual tea, not that powered sugar crap) for the summer months.

No need for huge and complex machines, this is all you need if you have a grocery shop or a coffee shop: https://www.pepebar.com/c/1956-0_thumb/M%C3%A1quinas%20de%20...

You push the white lever and juice comes out. In grocery shops it's customer operated.

It’s the boiling frog problem. Consumers gradually become used to lower quality. 15 years ago, McDonald’s was good. 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. https://wealthgang.com/mcdonalds-prices-throughout-the-years...

Of course they discontinued the angus burgers that actually used high quality ingredients compared to the McDouble / quarter pounders.

Now it’s $12 for a double quarter pounder meal and it tastes like shit. 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.

The Big Arch patty is better than the angus was. Their baseline burgers have always been crap.

After the whole debacle with the CEO not wanting to bite into it, I didn’t have high hopes. I’ll have to check it out.

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!

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.

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.

I might drive down this winter and see if it's still there.

It may surprise you to learn that Simply Beverages is owned by Coca-Cola, who also own Minute Maid.

Simply is definitely the superior of their product lines.

From the store bought orange juices, I think the Trader joes one is the closest to tasting like fresh-squeezed.

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