Orange juice manufacturers are grappling with sky-high prices amid a global supply shortage that could force them to turn to alternatives like mandarins.
A global shortage of oranges that sent prices soaring has prompted some orange juice manufacturers to consider turning to alternative fruits to make the breakfast staple.
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"There are three main factors driving the soaring price of orange juice, and it's drought, disease and demand," Ted Jenkin, oXYGen Financial CEO and co-founder, told FOX Business.
The spike stems from declining output in Florida, which is the primary U.S. producer, and disease and extreme weather events in Brazil, which accounts for about 70% of global production.
Orange trees in Brazil have been suffering from a disease known as citrus greening. Once infected, citrus trees produce fruits that are partially green, small, misshapen and bitter. There is no cure, and trees typically die within a few years of infection.
The disease, along with severe heat waves and drought that occurred during the pivotal phases of flowering and early fruit formation, have put Brazil on track to register one of its worst orange harvests in more than three decades, according to a new report published by Fundecitrus and CitrusBR.
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In the past, orange juice makers have avoided long-term shortages by freezing juice stock, which can be preserved and used for up to two years, according to the Financial Times. However, even that frozen stock is dissipating because of a three-year shortage build-up.
Cools said that manufacturers may have to consider using a different fruit, like mandarins, because their trees are more resistant to the greening disease. However, that could be a lengthy process.
There’s a dirty secret in your glass of orange juice. Even though it says “not from concentrate,” it probably sat in a large vat for up to year with all the oxygen removed from it. This allows it to be preserved and dispensed all year-round. Taking out all the O2 also gets rid of all the flavor. So the juice makers have to add the flavors back in using preformulated recipes full of chemicals called “flavor packs.” Mmm, delicious, fresh-squeezed ethyl-butyrate!
Have you had either, just as they are? Neither are particularly sweet. Biting into a lemon is rarely as refreshing an experience as biting into a ripe sweet orange.
Guess if you added a metric fuckton of sugar it might be palatable, but if I want a want added sugar in my drinks, I'll have a soda of some sort.
And capitalistic mass production with no respect for natural resources, aka intensive farming. Plants are grown in huge monocultures with little to no genetic diversity thus making them prone to what would naturally be limited issues like unfavourable weather or diseases
Here in Florida there is a disease called citrus greening. The fruit grows small and falls off before it's ripe. It's basically destroyed the citrus industry. It's spread by flying insects so impossible to control and there is no cure.
So climate change doesn't help but that's not the main culprit.
Flying insects are not necessarily impossible to control. You can promote the populations of their predators.
The problem is, that usually requires promoting a mixture of amphibians, birds, reptiles, small mammals, and other insects. To do that, you need a habitat full of various plants, trees, and terrains, but vast swathes of land have been turned into dead monoculture, so the predators die out.
Or they could be transparent with their customers and call it a similar sounding new name, distinct enough in its own right but rhyming with the original name, but the capitalist pigs won't ever do that
They didn’t give a reason for declining output in Florida.
It does say:
On top of that, Florida has been hit by a series of hurricanes as well as the greening disease, which is spread by a tiny insect called the Asian citrus psyllid.
There's also the fact that Florida just chased away all the migrant workers and undocumented workers. Bit of a labor shortage down there at the moment.
"The innovation [of concentrated juice] arrived as Florida growers were dealing with cyclical, massive overproduction. The promise of a new way to make juice that could be kept frozen, then reconstituted in people’s homes, prompted them into even more production, however. They ramped up tree planting in the 1940s. The oranges went to frozen concentrate and eventually, to chilled juice, an industry term for the refrigerated product. If juice could be kept in stasis, held in waiting for a consumer’s glass, then the only problem was ramping up demand as much as possible."
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"It had taken a few decades, but with the help of advertising and processing technology, the dumping ground for extra oranges was solidly ensconced as its own product, far outpacing oranges themselves in sales."
It isn't just ' freezing juice stock', really that hasn't been the way things have been done in a long time.
JuicePaks from givaudan have been normalized since maybe the '80's.
Consumers expect orange juice to taste like 'orange juice', year round, whether it was a good or bad year. There isn't anything intrinsically bad about that anymore than expecting bananas to taste like Cavendish.
The world is changing though, and tastes will have to adapt.
There are greening tolerant (not resistant) varieties developed already, yes of course biologists have been and are urgently working on it. I have a "sugar bell" tree, that's one of them.