- Sep 13, 2002
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The Last Days of American Orange Juice
Savor every last drop.By Yasmin Tayag
Whenever my mom comes to visit, she scolds me for not having orange juice in my fridge. “What about your health?” she asks, to which I reply: “What about my bank account?”
As in many families, orange juice was always on the breakfast table when I was growing up. It was affordable, delicious, and full of vitamin C. (The high levels of sugar were considered less of a problem at the time.) But orange juice isn’t so cheap anymore. Tropicana, for instance, has shrunk its bottles and raised prices in recent years. And since 2019, the price of concentrate has increased by about 80 percent. Chances are slim that it’ll go down anytime soon.
Some of this is because of inflation. And if President Donald Trump ever goes through with the tariffs he has threatened against Mexico and Canada, orange juice—which once came to Americans from Florida, but now is generally made from a mix of international oranges—could become even more expensive. Yet orange juice also is facing a grander existential problem than the economy. The world’s biggest orange producers aren’t growing as much fruit as they used to. As orange availability slides, the era of orange-juice ubiquity is rapidly coming to an end.
The primary cause is a disease known as citrus greening. When tiny, hard-to-control insects called Asian citrus psyllids feed on orange trees, they inject bacteria that floods the tree’s veins. Fruits become rancid, misshapen, and discolored, and within a few years, the tree dies. Around the world, millions of acres of orange trees have succumbed, and in the past 20 years, production in Florida’s storied orange groves, which once supplied the majority of America’s juice, has declined 92 percent. What little fruit is left on the trees gets blown to the ground by hurricanes, which are becoming more destructive in the state.
Growers have a few tools to mitigate the disease, such as antibiotic injections and plant-growth sprays to boost fruit production, but they are costly and labor-intensive to use. Many have given up and sold their generations-old groves to real-estate developers; in January, one of Tropicana’s suppliers, Alico, announced that it will no longer invest capital in its citrus operations once the current crop is harvested, because its business is no longer “economically viable.”
Citrus greening has no cure: Labs around the country are racing to develop disease-resistant trees, but research is slow because trees take up to eight years to bear fruit, Tripti Vashisth, a citrus expert at the University of Florida’s Institute of Food and Agricultural Sciences, told me. At the rate trees are dying, a solution is likely to come too late.
The dwindling fruit supply is making orange juice harder, but not impossible, to produce. Other orange-growing countries are contributing more of the juice sold in U.S. stores. Out of curiosity, I read the ingredients on a carton of Florida’s Natural at the grocery store: “juice from Florida, Mexico, & Brazil.” These countries haven’t yet been hit as hard by citrus greening as Florida; about 40 percent of their crops have been affected so far. Still, their supply is uncertain too. American orange-juice manufacturers will be on edge until April, when the impact of citrus greening on this year’s crop in Brazil will first become apparent, Andrés Padilla, a citrus-supply expert at Rabobank, a bank serving the agricultural industry, told me. If the situation worsens, companies may have to source oranges from countries even farther abroad, such as Spain, Italy, Turkey, and India, where the disease is less pronounced.
For the juice industry, international oranges are more of a lifeline than a long-term fix. The only places where citrus greening isn’t affecting orange groves yet are Europe and Australia, Vashisth said. Imported fruit can be costly, and its flavor varies because of differences in variety, growing conditions, and taste preferences. (European oranges skew tart because locals like their juice sour, while American varieties cater to the nation’s sweet tooth.) To maintain the flavor profile that U.S. customers expect, manufacturers have to blend different batches of juice, much like they would batches of wine or whiskey.
For the industry, those blends mark a big shift from a time when orange-juice products were proudly made—and consumed—in America. “Everybody went for the 100 percent Florida. It was a premium juice, without any doubt,” Carol Plisga, a beverage-industry consultant, told me. After the citrus-greening crisis started in the early 2000s, the 100% Florida label began to disappear from cartons.
More poignant, orange juice itself is beginning to lose significance. “It’s definitely already a much smaller category than it was 20 years ago,” Padilla said. Other beverages, such as teas, coffees, seltzers, energy drinks, and bottled waters—some of which sugar-conscious consumers might view as healthier alternatives—have helped nudge it out. And some juice makers are extending their orange supply with juice from other fruits, such as tangerines and mandarins, which aren’t affected by citrus greening, and even apple and lemon. Plus, as family sizes shrink and growing numbers of people live alone, people are simply buying less orange juice, Padilla said.
I ended up buying the carton of Florida’s Natural at the grocery store. It cost about $5—reasonable, I thought, as long as my family doesn’t drain it too quickly. We savored every drop. Orange juice as a category “will not disappear” entirely, because people will pay up for foods they see as healthy, Plisga told me. But maintaining the custom of a daily glass will either be that much more costly, or it will break.
In many ways, the decline of orange juice represents the future of many staple foods. Continuous abundance, a prerequisite for staples, is no longer guaranteed. More and more, the notion of the classic American breakfast—bacon, eggs, toast, milk, coffee, and a glass of orange juice—is beginning to seem like a snapshot of a bygone era. Not only is the supply of orange juice becoming shaky, but so is that of eggs, milk, and coffee (not to mention other goods, such as chocolate and olive oil). None of this means that we’ll have to go without these foods anytime soon. But for everyday Americans, it will likely mean having less.
