The Shocking Truth About:"Freshly Squeezed" Orange Juice

Posted By Dr. Mercola | August 16 2011 | 

If you buy orange juice at the store, you may lean towards the kind that advertises itself as "100 percent juice" and "not made from concentrate".  But have you ever wondered why every glass of it tastes exactly the same?  That's because the flavor of store-bought orange juice has more to do with chemistry than nature.

For industrially-produced orange juice, after the oranges are squeezed, the juice is stored in giant holding tanks and the oxygen is removed from them, which allows the liquid to keep for up to a year without spoiling.  It also makes the juice completely flavorless. So the industry uses "flavor packs" to re-flavor the juice.

According to Food Renegade:

"Juice companies therefore hire flavor and fragrance companies ... to engineer flavor packs to add back to the juice to make it taste fresh. Flavor packs aren't listed as an ingredient on the label because technically they are derived from orange essence and oil. Yet those in the industry will tell you that the flavor packs, whether made for reconstituted or pasteurized orange juice, resemble nothing found in nature."