I'm an orange juice snob! Things I never knew about my juice...

Source:  eddieross.com

Orange Juice!  Yum!  There is something so wonderful about starting my day with a small glass of QUALITY orange juice.  And just like I used to sit and read the cereal boxes at breakfast, I started paying attention to the orange juice cartons.  :-)

I used to be a TROPICANA addict.  Never Minute Maid - only Tropicana.  For me, there was no other orange juice on the planet.  Then came along Florida's Natural and I tried it at a friends house and I loved it.  So even though I didn't abandon Tropicana, there was now room for two OJ options in my life.

Then came Simply Orange - good stuff!  (Followed by Simply Apple (SO GOOD!), Simply Lemonade, etc.  I love the Simply line of drinks!)

Whilst on vacation in Florida last summer, we were greeted with an overwhelming number of orange juice selections.  I mean here we are in Florida and there were so many independent farms that produce their own juice.  Each time we go, we try a different local product and keep a log of reviews of our favorites.  (Just a silly thing we do.)

But when back home in Chicago, there aren't that many options.  So when I started reading the Florida's Natural carton, I was very impressed.  Florida's Natural is squeezed from fresh oranges, never concentrate. They never import its orange juice!  100% FLORIDA!  INGREDIENTS?  Pasteurized orange juice.  That's it!  No water, no sugar, etc.  Just orange juice - how great is that?

So I decided to compare and did you know that Tropicana started to import oranges from Brazil?  I mean our economy is in the dumper and we are importing oranges when we don't need to be?  I was a little taken aback.  Then I decided to check out Simply Orange.  SAME THING!  They use both US and Brazilian oranges and they actually note on the container if the juice is just US oranges or an combination of US/BRAZIL.  Seriously?

When I was a huge fan of Tropicana, they did not import oranges.   And to make matters worse, Tropicana just announced on January 25th that they have stopped using oranges from Brazil because in South America they use a pesticide illegal in the United States?  WHAT????   I am so disappointed.

Even Santa Claus agrees that orange juice should only come from FLORIDA!  :-)

So now I guess Tropicana is going to launch this huge ad campaign about how they only use Florida oranges.  Sorry - too late!  My loyalty is now to Florida's Natural - they even have an American flag on their carton - AWESOME!

An very interesting anecdote, when PepsiCo who owns Tropicana decided to change the carton, it was a disaster and sales dropped 20% in one month!  I guess we just don't like change but when you look at the picture of the new carton vs. the old, it was a no-brainer.  Thankfully, they actually went back to the old design.  Don't we love the striped straw?  :-)

And remember the Orange Bird and Anita Bryant and how they used to sing about Florida orange juice?  Did you know that the Walt Disney Productions Company created the Orange Bird for the Florida Citrus Council.

Knock! Knock!  Who's there?  Orange.  Orange who?  Orange you glad you read my post today?  :-)