Where your Florida orange juice comes from
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In 1915, Claude E. Street produced his first bottle of Street's Grapefruit Juice in Haines City, Florida, becoming the first citrus juice processing manufacturer in America. Today, behind Brazil, Florida is the second-largest producer of orange juice in the world with nearly 76,000 Floridians working in the citrus industry or a related business, generating more than $8.6 billion in economic activity. Here's a look at where your orange juice is produced now and has been in the past.
Read More: https://www.metrojacksonville.com/article/2017-dec-where-your-florida-orange-juice-comes-from (https://www.metrojacksonville.com/article/2017-dec-where-your-florida-orange-juice-comes-from)
Where are the oranges for that "juice production" grown? Can't remember the last time I saw an orange grove during my travels around the state.
Many packing houses and juice processing plants have closed since 1990 due to the urbanization of the state. One, Waverly Growers (on page three of the article) specifically mentioned shutting down their facility because there wasn't enough fruit left to justify running a large packing house after most of the groves that it served were lost to development. Hundreds of thousands of acres still remain in the south central part of the state. In some cases, processing plants own groves to ensure they have enough fruit to process. In other cases, some companies like Tropicana and Minute Maid get additional oranges from places like Brazil to keep their operations humming.
Interesting marketing video, but the Dept. of Citrus intentionally leaves out some important information, specifically between 1:30 and 1:52. Whether it's from Florida or not, the "not from concentrate" juice we buy at the store is nowhere near as fresh or natural as it's presented by Pepsi (Tropicana), Coca-Cola (Minute Maid & Simply Orange), or the other big brands. The game changing statements in the video are:
QuoteThe orange juice is pasteurized for food safety
and
QuoteThanks to state of the art technology, Florida orange juice is available year-round.
There's an important stage between squeezing and delivery to the store that's somewhat of an open secret in the OJ industry. After the oranges are squeezed, the oxygen is removed and the juice is stored in giant holding tanks, which allows the liquid to keep for up to a year without spoiling. The problem is that removing the oxygen also removes all of the flavor-creating chemicals, so to bring the flavor back in, the company adds "flavor packs" to create each brand's signature taste.
Alissa Hamilton, who authored a book about the OJ industry in 2009, summarized the process here:
http://civileats.com/2009/05/06/freshly-squeezed-the-truth-about-orange-juice-in-boxes/
Yes, there are several citrus flavoring manufacturers in Central Florida now. A few are Treatt, Citra Source, Givaudan Flavors and Firmenich. Also, most of the large processing plants that have closed are still partially in use, as the bigger companies use their tank farms to store juice. Florida's Natural uses the old Golden Gem plant in Umatilla for this and when Adams (Florida Global Citrus) closed, it was immediately converted into a company called All-Temp Storage. There was another company called Winter Garden Citrus Products and its old juice plant now stores juice for Netherlands-based Louis Dreyfus. In Auburndale, a few years ago, Cutrale built their own massive tank farm that spans several blocks. It's pictured below.
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With that said, there are some regional brands that have created a niche for themselves. For example, Natalie's Orchid Island in Fort Pierce pulls its juice off the shelves 17 days after extraction. Their products are on the shelves in local grocery stores right next to the nationally known brands.
Quote from: thelakelander on December 27, 2017, 08:13:58 AM
Many packing houses and juice processing plants have closed since 1990 due to the urbanization of the state. One, Waverly Growers (on page three of the article) specifically mentioned shutting down their facility because there wasn't enough fruit left to justify running a large packing house after most of the groves that it served were lost to development. Hundreds of thousands of acres still remain in the south central part of the state. In some cases, processing plants own groves to ensure they have enough fruit to process. In other cases, some companies like Tropicana and Minute Maid get additional oranges from places like Brazil to keep their operations humming.
That's just the tip of the iceberg as far as problems go for Florida oranges. Oranges are very susceptible to cold, which we periodically het in Florida. Three freezes in the 80s wiped out most of Central Florida's oranges (we remember the last freeze here in Jax for the "Great Snow of 1989"). It devastated the farms and most landowners had no other option to avoid ruin besides selling over to developers. The citrus farming industry moved further south, although many if not most of the juice processors are still in Central Florida. But now Florida has been hit hard by citrus greening disease. Since 2005 it's affected the majority of citrus trees in the state. There's no cure, no immune cultivars are known, and no one knows how to stop or even slow it down effectively. The 2017 crop of Florida oranges is apparently the lowest since 1940, and next year may be even worse. The state is on the verge of losing one of its major industries.
Growing up in Polk County, we didn't get snow in 89'. However, the freezes took out both of my town's major juice plants (Bordo and General Foods Bird's Eye/TreeSweet) by the 1990 season. Since then, there's been a ton of consolidation in the industry. In my town, the Winter Haven Citrus Growers Association sold its packing house to an adjacent dairy. Now they're a member with Florida's Natural and their old plant site is a strip mall. Another packing house got creative to stay alive by launching a tangerine juice line. Overall, the number of packing houses seem to have been impacted more by the loss of acerage. In November 2017, the Haines City Citrus Growers Association became the most recent to annouce plans to sell its equipment and packing house operation altogether. However, despite most of the grove acreage shifting south, the large juice plants in Central Florida have survived because it's cost prohibitive to construct new capacity when there's not enough fruit to run existing plants at capacity. Much easier to transport fruit to them as opposed to bringing them to the groves. Just last month, an Isreal-based company purchased a closed plant in Winter Garden for their US entrance into the citrus industry. I suspect, they'll be bringing in fruit grown outside of Florida as a part of whatever they have planned.
My family owns a few hundred acres of groves and they're looking to get out. They've already got a developer lined up. Greening has put a hurting on them.
Quote from: acme54321 on December 27, 2017, 08:00:33 PM
My family owns a few hundred acres of groves and they're looking to get out. They've already got a developer lined up. Greening has put a hurting on them.
Best of luck to them. Greening is pretty devastating and there's no way out for the foreseeable future.