Comparing Oranges to Oranges

The Star Tribune's John Ewoldt ran a valuable, consumer-oriented column in Sunday's paper. Writing about a book called Squeezed: What You Don't Know About Orange Juice, he reported that orange juice sold as "not from concentrate" (NFC) is not only more expensive than other orange juice, it is actually more processed and artificial, not less.

If you're like me, you assumed that NFC meant something close to fresh squeezed, right? Wrong.

NFC juice is "often a heavily pasteurized product. In the pasteurization process, it's heated, stripped of oxygen and flavor chemicals, then put in huge storage vats for up to a year. When it's ready for packaging, flavor derived from orange essence and oils is added to make it taste fresh." Orange "flavor" doesn't have to be listed on the ingredients because it is "natural" in some sense of the word.

Where did the NFC usage come from? Well, Tropicana was using the process, which is more expensive than concentrating and reconstituting, and it needed a way to get consumers to pay more to cover its costs. So someone at the company (or at their ad agency, I suspect) came up with the phrase. And consumers (including me, occasionally) have been coughing up the bigger bucks ever since.

Clearly, if you can't do fresh squeezed, the best bet is frozen concentrate -- the cheapest price for probably the next best product.

Here's a photo I found via Google of some NFC juice ready for shipping in China:


Not quite how I pictured it, based on the packaging shown in the photo at the top of this post. How about you?