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Comment by derefr | Hacker News Reader

I'm surprised that this is the state of the art. Compare this to the manufacture of, say, orange juice: from the input oranges, the chemicals are all individually distilled out, put into separate bioreactors at exact concentrations along with additives and catalysts, each reaction product is filtered to remove waste products, and then the results are mixed back together in prescribed concentrations. Effectively, they're making a completely synthetic product, like a plastic or a mouthwash, except that (almost) all the input chemicals happen to be extracted from the same source.

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Is that, uh, true?

I'm trying to find another source and while I can find mention of pasteurization and discussions of how concentrates from different batches are blended to maintain a consistent taste, I can't find any more information about separating chemicals or bioreactors.

Yes, it's my understanding too. The OJ factory creates "flavor packs", essentially artificial flavor constructed from chemicals extracted from the oranges. Plenty of sources out there for it, but Wikipedia is a good place to start spidering from: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orange_juice#Not_from_concentra....

Personally, I'm not really against artificial food, but you have to admit the labeling is misleading. Also, efficiently using a single source with fixed ratios of compounds in it sounds like a fun engineering problem. "How can I turn this pipe of mixed chemicals into this other pipe of mixed chemicals at lowest cost and least waste?"

The citation on using the orange peel is a Tropicana spokesperson response to a Baltimore Sun article in 2010.

>"Everything in the juice comes from the orange," she said. "One hundred percent juice is mixed with natural oils found in the peel. Nothing artificial is added."

I think you could synthesize the compounds in a lab and still get away with that statement. Barely.

Not that it matters whether the compounds are organically sourced and purified or synthesized, but they have a vested interest in making their product appear more natural and have been misleading consumers for a while.

Wow. I never knew that.

I do know that I far prefer the taste of fresh-squeezed (and, in fact, won't buy anything that is not). But I never really knew why.

You prefer fresh-squeezed because it's neither oxidized nor heat-treated. Squeeze an orange into 3 beakers and let the juice stand for 1/2 day, a day, and 2 days; you'll see that it loses the appealing brightness and floral notes quickly.

http://www.cookingissues.com/2010/10/01/fresh-lime-juice-wtf...

Note that whether or not it says "from concentrate", this process is still happening. If it wasn't, they wouldn't be able to screen out pesticides and bacterial agents, and wouldn't be able to keep each jug to the correct concentrations of its component chemicals (which each have very different molecular weights, and so would band in industrial mixers) and so forth.

If you mean that you prefer actual juice you get by juicing an orange yourself, then sure. But "fresh-squeezed" orange juice at the supermarket is just organic synthesis without a freezing step. (Which is an important-enough distinction; freezing fruit, or its juices, denatures a lot of the nutrients.)

I think that "fresh-squeezed" is just what it means; if you look at the chemically de- and re-constructed juices (like Tropicana), they have some super evasive language on them about their juice being "squeezed from fresh oranges" or similar.

I either squeeze it myself or buy juice that was squeezed in my (local) grocery store. No store-bought brand comes close to the taste.

It has its upsides and downsides. When you are attempting to maintain a brand consistency of flavor is important. That requires a lot of processing. If someone is literally squeezing some oranges and giving you the juice, the flavor will be slightly different every time.

Slightly different, and almost always much better than juice processed this way.

One of the prices of consistency and conveninience is often flavor.

> I do know that I far prefer the taste of fresh-squeezed (and, in fact, won't buy anything that is not). But I never really knew why.

Honestly they should just forbid using the images of fresh fruits on the cover of their fruit juice packs. That's just a gross lie compared to what the contents is made of.

... and it doesn't taste close to orange juice. When I lived in the US, I got used to it and for a minute there thought it was - but every few months I got freshly squeezed orange juice from freshly picked oranges (not ones that were picked green, spent a few months in a freezer and then quickly gas-ripened just before getting to the store), and the flavor is completely different.

I am tempted to paraphrase Douglas Adams: It tastes quite, but not entirely, unlike orange juice.

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