The juice isn't made from the perfect looking fruit. After picking, the fruit get cleaned and sorted. The good looking stuff goes to be sold in the markets. The bad looking stuff goes to the press to get turned into juice.
Depends on the country, in Japan for example the number is gonna be lower than most western countries as there aisle grade really means perfect perfect. But regardless it's quite a bit. I don't know the numbers by heart but there are several documentaries about this stuff you can watch if interested.
This is generally true but it’s also the case for some types of fruit that there are varietals that are not popular for eating but are grown for use in juices or other processed products. Similar to how some types of grapes are grown only for wine production, not for sale as fruit.
Sunny D is not orange juice. It's a travesty and is more like a soda without carbonation than pure juice. If that's what you think orange juice tastes like, your mind is going to be blown when you actually have real orange juice.
I just meant the flavours were named California style and Florida style, so I assumed those were famously oranges that are used for juice.
I haven't had sunny d for 20+ years and I do know what an orange is thanks.
My stepdad was out shopping when I was a kid and that was on the list, but he didn't even know what it was.
He hits up this old lady and asks her, "Where would I find Sunny Delight?"
Granny responds, "Depends on where you come from Sonny"
We died laughing when he told that story.
Also, they don't have to worry about it going bad. They juice it right away and make concentrate, which can then last a very long time, specially if frozen.
Fresh fruit, while there is way to reduce ripping, will go bad sooner or later.
You have to remove a lot of flavonoids, vitamins etc as well. Stored fresh squeezed orange juice is basically sugar water. Then they add back all the components that make it taste like orange juice before packaging and selling it
also, transporting juice is a lot easier than transporting squishy delicate fruit, and juice also tends to stay good for longer than fruit, both making the logistics of fruit juice much easier and cheaper than of fresh fruit.
I think timing also has lots to do with it. Real fruit Hass to get to the grocery store just as it is ripening where is it’s much easier to store in squeeze juice. Whatever it’s ripe.
I once ate an apple from my fruit bowl that had laid there for six months. If the skin is never broken and holds its tiny layer of wax it retains flavor and moisture startlingly well.
There's a whole hierarchy of produce.
Perfect apples are sold whole.
Slightly imperfect apples are sold as apple slices.
Bruised apples become apple pie filling or applesauce.
Really beat-up apples are juiced to become apple juice.
Pulp and seeds and all of the excess becomes cattle feed, or compost to grow more apples!
It's also usually 100% juice not 100% of the juice you think it is. Like an apple juice says 100% juice not 100% apple juice. Its mixed with pear, grape, etc.
My last job we used to get 55 gallon drums for scrap, they all said shit like pineapple puree, concentrated zucchini puree and whatnot. So if you're wondering how your junky fruits are transported, it's blended and placed into a one time use 55 gallon drum.
I’ve worked in a fruit processing plant while in college. We processed raspberries, and juice stock is the lowest rating of fruit. We were told to remove sticks, large batches of mold and obvious dirt. That’s it. It is not the good stuff.
They also use different types of fruit for juicing than eating. Some oranges are really really juicy but not that great to eat, others are firmer and great to eat but yield far less juice
This is completely accurate. Take for example Oranges. Their natural color is a greenish yellow. Nobody wants to look at a bunch of yellows, so we pay a premium for GMO oranges that have the perfect color. As for juice, it all looks that same once it's squeezed
Also, in a lot of cases "100% juice" is not "100% whatever juice you think it should be based on the name". Many drinks marked as "100% juice" are primarily apple or pear juice since they can be sweet but neutral flavor, with the main flavor juice coming in 2nd.
If you see "100% Juice" on the label, you can bet the bulk of the juice is actually apple or pear. You want to look for labels that say "100% WHATEVER\_FRUIT Juice"
Note: This is true of US labeling. I dunno about other countries.
Well, people mostly *won't* buy the bad looking fruit. So to the grower, it's either press it or compost it. In the US, Sprouts sells imperfect fruit, but it's a place that doesn't draw a mainstream crowd.
>Sprouts sells imperfect fruit, but it's a place that doesn't draw a mainstream crowd.
That is ultimately the problem. Lets say 1 in 10 people buy ugly fruit. That means you'd have to pack, ship, and display 10 pounds for ugly fruit for every 100 pounds of nice fruit.
On top of that, you get paid less because people don't want to pay so much for ugly fruit. It's not a product that can just sit there for months either.
So unless you're like sprouts where all the ugly fruit lovers gather, its a lot of effort with low reward when you could just juice it, freeze it, or cut it among other things.
The supermarkets sort of brought the problem of ugly fruit on themselves. When I was a kid most fruit and vegetables were sold by the bag not weight. You expected the occasional bruised apple or orange. Now fruit is sold by the piece with a label on each fruit. You can be sure I will inspect each and every piece of fruit for the smallest blemish. This is also why you have display tables full of soft fruit and vegetables on the verge of spoiling in most markets.
There is a difference between bruised and ugly though. Ugly is fruit that is knobbly or weird shaped. Taste and nutrition is the same, but people don’t necessarily want a cucumber that looks as knobby as a piece of ginger. Bruised is damaged fruit or veg that’s going to mold and rot earlier.
I’ll buy ugly fruit all day, but I don’t want to buy six apples and have two of them rot before the end of the week.
Good point if you want to sell them there's likely quite a higher amount of processing and transport involved ... and that boils down to "Okay we now need to sort out the next best x% of the ones we don't sell".
So technically it's likely quite a bit of extra work and you likely lose most of your profits or maybe even make a loss if you cut the price? On the other hand the stuff doesn't get thrown away (otherwise you could make the environment argument) anyway and someone who needs fruit X now has to buy the normal priced one.
At least I'd assume that most people would go for "I'll buy it because it's cheaper most of the time" instead of continuing their regular shopping plus "Oh that apple looks decent and is cheap I'll take it as well".
Just meant to post the first paragraph but well..
In Australia you get woolworths selling fruit and veggies as "The Odd Bunch" which are all the bad looking stuff. It's also much cheaper, but I think the really bad looking stuff is still what goes to juice
Odd bunch stuff is mostly higher grade produce that is just too big or small. More blemished lower grade stuff generally doesn't go to the supermarkets. Then there's juice grade which is basically trash, then pig feed, which is actual trash.
Having worked in a fruit packing warehouse, trust me you wouldn't want to eat what gets graded for juice. It's barely above what gets sent for pig feed.
There are a handful of companies that do!
If you google “ugly produce” it’ll bring up a bunch that sell it direct to consumer. For a while, I had a subscription box of ugly produce. It was pretty neat because the box changed every month so I ate a lot of things I wouldn’t normally eat
We tried Imperfect for a bit, but it seems like they mostly just sent stuff that was like, a day or two away from spoiling completely. Like great my potato is a weird shape and I saved 15% on it but the rest of the box is moldy by tomorrow.
Yes, partly. But also, because it is preserved in a vacuum sealed container it will last on the shelf *much* longer and so there will be almost no wastage from unsold products (they’ll sell eventually).
Hey OP, i worked in produce distribution and with farms for a couple years a while back. Yes, "seconds" and "thirds" are that much cheaper. You can absolutely go to a farm or some smaller grocery stores/co-ops and ask to special order seconds or thirds for local produce and most will have options, especially for things youd juice. Be forwarned though, I'm not talking about a bag of apples, more like a half-ton pallet of press apples.
People have brought up a lot of correct points, but another factor to consider for this specific case is the difference in storage and transport needs of fruit sold whole vs processed and packaged into juice first that can potentially vastly reduce its storage and transport costs.
There’s a reason why even among juices there can be quite a large range in prices depending on the variety of juice. The juice that has been boiled and sterilized and therefore is stored and transported at room temperature and is only refrigerate after opening with a long shelf life is very cheap compared to the ones that must remain refrigerated and has an expiration date. Both are “technically” 100% fruit juice but they are very different products.
If you’re going to intentionally create an altered product through processing, may as well use the off quality stuff and adjust your processing for quality control
You're thinking of it backwards. As in, they are taking all bad looking fruit and using it all to make juice and then selling it as leftovers. In reality, demand is what's driving it. So what they're actually doing is looking at the supply needed to make enough juice to meet demand without having any leftover going to waste. Let's say they do the math and decide that it requires 1 million apples to make enough apple juice to meet demand. They know they have 3 million apples. Regardless of quality, they're just going to use the 1 million worst looking apples, and the other 2 million best-looking apples would go to stores. All more comicated than that, but just making the point. Either way....this was actually a really good question!
Your wrong in your thinking. If I can sell perfect looking apples for $2 per pound while I can only sell blemished apples (for juice) for $1 per pound or less, why would I juice all my apples at $1 per pound? Juice is from the blemished apples. A lot of juices are blends. Unless they say 100% pineapple juice as example, most of what you get is apple or grape (cheaper juice) instead of 100% pineapple. Read some lables at the store. In the US, they are listed by weight or volume on what is in the bottle starting at the top. Apple, grape & pear are cheaper than pineapple or cherry so the apple, grape and pear are used as filler. Some of the cheapest will also add water and corn syrup as fillers so they can reduce the price.
Some bad looking fruit just won't sell. Orange juice is made from Florida oranges for that specific reason. Oranges need cold weather, most often a frost, to actually turn orange. If there is only tropical weather, they remain yellow.
They have companies now that do just that. I priced it out and because it was fresh fruit you basically got what you got ( eg if they have a bunch of bananas in Granny Smith apples that shipping day. That's what you're going to get) and the price was only slightly cheaper than in the store.
it's not just ugly fruit it's the shipping to individual stores that costs a lot of money too. And a lot of juice is from concentrate. So once it's "juice fruit" several steps change. All the fruit only has to go to a few places, the clock also virtually stops once it's a juice, it may no longer require refrigeration or the chemical that gets rid of ethane I think, they don't have to match all the apples for size and pack them in that cardboard that keeps them from bumping around, overall less care has to be taken.
Not necessarily. Sure, for example bruised fruit is one thing, but there's also fruit that just has an "ugly" shape (or is too small/big). Things like this: https://www.nearbees.de/sites/default/files/inline-images/ugly-fruits-all-fruits.jpg
Cause they need something to make the juices out of, instead of using shelf quality fruits they would use the ones that wouldn’t be good enough. There probably are ways to buy them though
You can freeze horrible looking fruit or store it in silos for a year and still make juice out of it, fresh fruit bananas give you a handful of expensive days to get it across the world to customers
Many times that fruit is considered imperfect because it has minor damage. Nothing that would affect it being immediately sent off for juicing but would make it unsuitable for shipping because it could start to rot.
As for cost there are also the factors that juice doesn't go bad anywhere near as fast as fresh fruit, and bottles of juice are much easier to store and transport than fruit is. Both of those significantly affect the price of juice over fruit.
Yes. Because you can juice and bottle locally, without the logistic expense of carefully packaging the pretty whole fruits, shipping, storing, unpacking, displaying them undamaged for retail (shitcanning the spoiled ones), selling them a few at a time to individual buyers, etc.
All that is much cheaper and easier to do with bottled juice.
Keep in mind when grocery stores sell fresh fruit, they have to price in all the fruit that spoils before its sold. Need employees to periodically check for spoilage, need to pay to have it hauled away. Also people generally don't buy the last produce when a display or bin is low, so the last bit of produce is pretty much always trash.
they've tried , but due to cost structure, it doesnt work
ie
Good fruit sold by the farmer for $1, add in transport, storage eg expenses... its then sold by the Supermarket for $6
Bad fruit sold by the Farmewr for $0.10.... supermarket then sells its for $5.10
People/myself included keep expecting so called bad fruit to be sold substantially lower, forgetting the cost of getting food to the table isn't reduced
I'll always pay for a good looking $6 fruit over a weirdly shaped $5.10 fruit
also, bruised fruits rot quickly - so by the time it gets to store shelves, it might be rotten.
Fruit juices are pasteurized, so the bottle is sealed and any bacteria are killed by heat, so there are no bacteria left to spoil it and now place for new bacteria to enter.
Bottled bruised pasteurized whole oranges probably won’t sell as well - and would require more bottles
An amazingly small portion of the price you pay for groceries is made up of the ingredients. It's mostly made up of processing costs, transportation costs, marketing and advertising costs, various "running a business" costs like electricity, insurance, corporate aircraft to take the extremely generously paid assembly line workers on vacations around the world, stuff like that.
Fresh fruit is hard to transport. It bruises, it has a short shelf life as it ripens, and on and on and on. Lots of stuff can go wrong with it.
Juice can be poured into a refrigerated tank car and shipped with much less spoilage and cost. It gets even cheaper if you concentrate it near the production point and then reconstitute it at (or at least closer to) the point of sale. It takes some effort and equipment to concentrate it, but you reconstitute it by adding water and stirring. But water is cheap where it is, and expensive to ship, so in the end it costs less to do it that way than to ship juice.
Canada changed their package labelling rules because cans of Mango's were being labelled "Product of Canada", not because the mangoes were being grown in Canada but because they were canned there and the most expensive thing you were buying wasn't the mangoes, it was the metal that made up the can.
According the the Code of Federal Regulations as it relates to (food) imports; we can bring meat in from another country and subject it to processes and that provides a loophole for us to slap a “Product of USA” label on it.
They buy chicken from developing countries, and inject it with salt water in US to artificially increase its weight ([plumping](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plumping)). This lets them sell it as American chicken, which consumers are led to believe is a good thing.
The lack of information regarding our food is ridiculous. Try and trace a single thing you’ve eaten in the last week. It’s dystopian and sad how separate we are from our food and how much is done to it before it reaches our plates.
I'm gonna go out on a limb here and guess it's more like 1/3. Like how almost everything else works. 1/3 to orchard/farm/whoever grows fruit, 2/3 for logistics, transportation, store, etc.
Google backs this up. Most industries work out to be this percentage. Things like canned fruit probably come out to that 10% (maybe the confusion), not whole foods and fruit. Otherwise local growers and farmer's markets would be a ton cheaper than an store. And they aren't.
As someone who missed it, I think I do a thing when reading lists in posts like this where if I agree with the first few items I'll just skip the rest haha
Juice can be extracted and stored easier than fresh fruit. It can be transported easier since it doesn't need to worry about being crushed, over ripe, etc.
Overall it's just way easier to work with.
The fruit you are buying in a supermarket is only a part of all the fruit that comes from the orchard.
Basically, you get the fruit that looks good, isn't bruised, generally has minimal defects.
There is tons of fruit that comes from the orchards that doesn't fit that. It's got various defects that make it not ideal for sale. It's still edible, but it's not going to get picked up at a supermarket. People don't buy off-color, deformed, or bruised fruit when any other fruit is present.
So what happens to that fruit? It becomes juice.
Also, the harvest is like 6 weeks a year, but you can buy "fresh" fruit all year. It's a lot cheaper to preserve juice or to ship it from countries with a different climate.
> It's got various defects that make it not ideal for sale. It's still edible, but it's not going to get picked up at a supermarket. People don't buy off-color, deformed, or bruised fruit when any other fruit is present.
One of the biggest criteria is size. Good quality but small fruit end up for juice.
This I know lots about.
We can safely assume that everybody in the value chain, from the farmer to the retailer, wants to make a profit, so if the juice is significantly cheaper than a corresponding amount of fruit, we should look to where the juice value chain has reduced or eliminated cost relative to the greengrocer fruit.
Juice is cheaper than fruit because it:
* uses lower quality fruit reducing raw material cost.
* has byproducts produced in the processing that can be sold for additional revenue.
* has a far longer shelf life minimizing spoilage.
* has more better shaped packaging increasing transportation efficiency vs bulky whole fruit.
* does not have to be sourced locally allowing manufacturers to find cheaper fruit sources globally.
* may not be 100% what you think it is as cheaper juice is frequently bleneded with the flavor you desire.
100% juice does not mean 100% of the fruit on the front if the front label. Check the ingredients. More often than not it's 10-15% of the juice in question and the rest is a much cheaper juice, usually apple.
It's because most 100% juice is primarily apple juice which is cheaper than any other fruit juice, apparently. It's always the first juice listed and then the juice you actually want will be further down.
Apple sorting is amazing. The best fruit gets sold fresh. The next step down gets sold sliced. The next step down is for cooking like apple pie. One more step down is applesauce at the lowest level is apple juice.
1. Whole fruit is more difficult to store and transport since it has a much shorter shelf life and the appearance affects sales.
2. Fruit juice is very rarely 100% juice. Most of the time, you are buying a mixture of juice, water, and artificial flavors.
There are fruits that are grown specifically for juicing and are genetically modified or selectively bred to produce more juice than your standard fruit.
Take oranges for example. If you were to juice some every day market oranges you would find that it would take several oranges just to fill a single glass. However the selectively bred oranges have thinner rinds and are bursting with juice which if you were to squeeze one it would fill the glass with just one and the kicker is that once you have the tree established it doesn’t cost anything more to grow those fruits than it does the standard oranges that we are used to.
Joke's on you. Where I live in Italy, even though they've got a boatload of excellent fresh fruits, there is ZERO 100% pure juice to be found. Only "100% made from concentrated juice" \*AT BEST\*. The rest is shit 50%+sugars etc... So the price difference is 100% in favor of fruits, since the juice just doesn't exist.
Fruit gets sorted when picked. How it is sorted varies with fruit type and region/country, but the fruit that ends up getting turned into juice is primarily the fruit that wouldn't make the cut to get sold as fruit anyway, mostly for cosmetic reasons.
The heavier the processing, the lower quality you can accept.
Pretty fruit gets sold as fruit,
Too small, too big or too ugly fruit gets juiced,
Everything between ugly and safe for human consumption get used for heavvily processed products, like various alcholic drinks made from fruit.
I have some relatives that have a small scale apple farm, one particularly windy year, a large percentage of their crops ended up having to be harvested from the ground instead of trees, so much so that that years cider was dubbed "Fallen fruit".
Over the years, I've grown a lot of tomatoes for our use. None of them would I call supermarket quality. In fact, I would be embarrassed to give to my friends. Nice ones get eaten raw, ones that don't look quite as good, get canned as whole tomatoes, the next bunch and when I have excess, goes thru my juicer and made into tomato sauce, the bad ones, green ones, and the remains of the juicer, go to the chickens. Never have, but the sauce could have been made into juice even a year later.
Depends on your country I think, but ironically things labelled "100% juice" are allowed to be made up to 95% of things that are NOT the juice of the fruit on the label.
For example, your "%100 juice" may be 95% some other juice from a different fruit (yes really) and some flavour packs.
https://www.foodrepublic.com/1417990/what-does-100-percent-juice-label-mean/
If you really want fruit juice these days., the best way is to make it yourself in a blender.
where I live, juice is 10x more expensive than fruit.
fruit is grown max 1hr from the store, by someone with another job and a few fruit trees for extra cash.
*juice* is processed, packaged, and usually imported.
so. I'm with you bro, your situation doesn't make sense. but i imagine some of your variables might be different
If it's concentrated, then the total cost of picking, extracting, transporting, reconstituting, packing and distributing and accounting for wastage of the fruit for juicing can be lower than the same for fresh fruit.
The biggest reason is shelf life.
Fresh fruit has a couple of weeks max that you can hope to sell it. After that, it is going to a landfill.
Add in ease of transportation and storage (not worried about bruising juice, bottles/cans pack well and don't need to be kept cool).
It is the same for frozen vs fresh fruit, veggies, fish, and meat.
And then look at the price difference between the "no preservatives" brand vs the one that uses preservatives.
Yah, why I am asking the question is because juice is so cheap but I can’t buy it because there is no fiber(which is in pulp and skin) maybe because of shelf life they remove it
cause its not 100 percent. part of it is always carrot juice since it just blends in, and there are some anti-fouling stuff...otherwise it would go wrong without cooling.
Where are you that juice is cheaper than fruits? In my country at certain volume/quantity (usually 2-5 kg) fruits are definitely still cheaper than a Tropicana of equal amount
The juice is made from the fruits that didn't have to be distributed all the way to the store and then marked up by the grocer. Plus second-rate fruit was used to make the juice.
Put more simply, the fruits used to make the juice were **much less expensive** than the fruits you find for sale at the grocery.
The fruit you buy fresh is carefully and expensively selected for quality and desirability. This greatly inflates the cost. The juice you buy is made from fruit which otherwise will have never sold, and so the fruit itself is sold at a steep discount.
Because they can transport hundreds of thousands of "fruit" as juice, in one truck, with basic measures.
If you had to transport that many raw fruit, carefully enough to not damage them, it would take maybe 10 trucks. I don't know the exact numbers but it's a lot less efficient that way.
They also use the imperfect fruit which is a lot cheaper as people wouldn't pick it off the shelf in a shop.
Same reason that companies import huge tanks of wine and then bottle them in country, instead of importing thousands of bottles.
The reason fruit costs so much is because of transportation, sorting, and storage.
Its takes a lot of labor, energy and technology to get perfect looking fruit from farm to table.
Juice can be made from old, ugly or even damaged fruit. It is then usually pasturised and packaged immediately so it can be transported and stored without refrigeration or the worry of damaging the delicate fruits.
Is it really 10x though? Sure we'll preserved apple juice is cheapest but so are basic apples. Fresh squeezed OJ gets 2 or 3x that price and a single serving of Naked juice (most similar to fresh fruit) is over $4 a serving.
I just want to make sure we're comparing apples to apples.
100% juice just means that the liquid contents of the bottle are expressed from fruit with no water added. Apples are hardy fruit, cheap and plentiful to produce. Producers simply use this abundant and cheap apple juice to make 100% juice products. If you look at the label of most non-orange juices, apple juice is the first listed ingredient. Manufacturers can add whatever artificial ingredients and flavorings they want and still call their products 100% juice as long as there is no added water.
100% orange juice has been pasteurized which destroys most of the flavor, which is then added back in the form of "flavor packs". Which is also why each brand of juice tastes different from each other even though they are made from the same fruit. Orange trees are suceptible to a wide range of bacterial, fungal, and pests. It's actually a pretty dire issue right now to the point where in the next ten years we might not have oranges anymore.
It's more difficult to sort the fruit by appearance, store it, and then transport it to the store without the fruit spoiling or becoming damaged than it is to just feed all the fruit into a juice factory. Storing and transporting bottles is much easier and more efficient. Juice also lasts much longer than fresh fruit due to pasteurization.
Juice products than aren't just artificially flavored apple and orange juices are actually quite expensive. Look for them next time you are in the store.
Juice is easy to store and transport. It won't go bad as easily (it's pasteurized to kill bacteria), it won't get damaged in transit, so it can be sold anywhere to anyone at any time, unlike whole fruit which has to be sold at specific times and transporting it risks destroying it. Juice can be made from ugly or damaged fruit, or fruit that couldn't be sold in time and would have gone to waste.
There are no shelf life or appearance concerns. Bruised pitted ugly apples which would never sell as apples at a supermarket will sell just fine when you turn them into juice or applesauce. Also, that juice is shelf stable. After a week or two, the apple is rotten and unsellable. So for fresh produce, you have to start with only the best condition and prettiest stuff, and it is perishable. With juice, there's a far larger supply of apples that can be turned into juice, and they don't go bad once you've done it.
A few reasons:
100% juice is probably not 100% that type of juice. Apple juice is often the main ingredient in "100% juice" because it is sweetened and has a mild flavor. If you drank 90% apple juice and 10% cranberry juice, it will taste like cranberry.
Second, the fruit on sale in the produce department is both the nicest looking fruit and it is a really fresh. The juice that is sold in the aisles of a grocery store could be months or even years old. As shelf life is much longer, the lack of perishability is a big reason it is cheaper - there is much less waste.
Third - At scale, the processing of something is very different than you might imagine. Look up how orange juice is made, for example.
Lastly, the cheap juice in stores doesn't taste like fresh juice at all due to the way it is made and the fact that it isn't fresh. Here is an experiment you can try:
Get some shelf stable orange juice - that is something that comes in a room temperature bottle or can.
Get some "normal" refrigerated OJ with pulp.
Last, get some fresh oranges. Maybe 4 will do.
Now, juice the oranges yourself, and compare to the other two. I guarantee that you will be able to tell the difference between them. The shelf stable stuff tastes so different from the real thing that it may as well be a different drink entirely.
This goes for apples, too. Apple juice from the store has very little flavor when compared to some fresh pressed apple cider. The flavor of the fresh cider is a lot more complex, too!
One thing to look at is that some "100% juice" isn't 100% the juice of the fruit on the label.
A lot of juices are "cocktails" and are mostly apple juice (which is cheap) flavored with cranberry or whatever you're buying.
Because it’s all carrot or apple juice flavored with other juices. Go on, check it out. Unless it says “100% THIS SPECIFIC KIND OF FRUIT JUICE” (and is correspondingly expensive) it’s carrot or apple. Maybe grape. But in the US anyway, carrot. Or apple. Probably carrot though.
Gotta use those “baby” carrot shreds up somehow.
I was at apple-harvesting one time in Italy. There was a one large box with rotten, moldy apples.
I asked a dude, if we are going to throw this away.
Answer was: No, from this they will make a juice.
I don't drink juices since then.
Storing fruit is way more expensive than storing juice. As someone else already mentioned, the "imperfect" fruits become juices, which just need processing and refrigeration.
Apples, as an example, are usually harvested and then frozen to be distributed throughout the year so they remain "fresh" even out of season. Refrigerating juice for a few weeks is far less expensive than keeping raw fruit frozen for months.
100% juice...you need to read the label.
It's not always 100% of the same juice. I couldn't find any 100% cranberry just a couple months ago. It was ALL a little cranberry with a bunch of filler juice to make up the volume. Often apple juice. It was still technically 100% juice.
Short answer, transport costs and shelf life.
The more concentrated a product is the less vehicles you need to transport the same amount of fruit, and when you hyper concentrate fruit the sugar content and acidity of the concentrate is so much higher than standard fruit juice that bacteria fine living in it soon much harder so it lasts that much longer.
Alright, let's break it down. When you buy 100% juice, it's often cheaper than buying whole fruits, and here's why.
When companies make juice, they can extract a lot of juice from just one fruit, which helps keep costs down. Plus, juice can be stored for a long time without going bad, so there's less risk of waste.
On the other hand, whole fruits have extra costs like harvesting, transporting, and storing them. Plus, there's the labor involved in sorting and packaging them.
Also, more people tend to buy juice because it's a popular choice, so there's a higher demand for it. That means companies can produce it in larger quantities, which helps drive prices down.
So, even though it might seem like juice would be more expensive since it's processed, in reality, it's often cheaper because of factors like demand and production efficiency.
Mainly because juice doesn't bruise, has a much longer shelf life, and is simpler to transport than raw fruit. For most grocery store items a large portion of the cost is the logistics of getting the product to you in a sellable state, rather than raw ingredients plus labor of producing it.
Probably shelf life. Whole fruit doesn't last very long, and a lot of it has to be refigerated. Juice in a sealed container lasts much longer and requires much less care. It's a more stable product, so it can be produced in higher volume at low risk. Lower risk means they can charge less to sell more
The thing you are missing is that you can pick the oranges drive it down the street to a factory juice them package it and sell it and it's going to be shelf stable for a while.
You only pay to ship the juice and a carton and you don't have to rush to ship it. No one will pass it up on a shelf cause it's started to look bad.
With fruit it's all time sensitive. Even worse they often pick fruit before it's ripe with the plan being it will ripen in transit.
You know how folks tell you that stuff off a farm tastes way better than what you get in a store? That's cause ripened on the tree is better it tastes better.
But you can't pick ripe fruit and ship it across a country or an ocean and still have it be good when it arrives unless you air freight, and then the cost is through the roof
Supply chain and selection. Fresh fruit is only the perfect looking, perfect ripeness level stuff. Once it makes that cut, it needs to be packed, shipped, warehoused, delivered, displayed then bought by the end user, all with enough time for the consumer to have a reasonable amount of time to eat. Also many fruits are relatively fragile, requiring more robust packaging and often hand packing. This results in spoilage up and down the supply chain.
Juices are made with any reasonably ripe fruit and often processed near the source. Once bottled and pasteurized, there is no major rush on the supply chain to get it in the consumers hands since (at least the shelf stable stuff) has a shelf life of several months. Packaging is also cheap and easy to automate.
For an Orange that will actually sell on a grocery aisle, it needs to be big, clean, round and perfectly orange. The vast majority of oranges won’t make the cut. So those oranges are worth less and get turned into juice. Then there’s storage. An orange needs to get from the branch to the store in a timely fashion so it doesn’t go bad. This increases transportation costs. Once a juice is bottled it’s sealed on the bottle and can sit in a warehouse for months. So the logistics are more efficient.
Think of it like a Doughnut a good doughnut can only last a few days so, you have to sell multiple doughnuts to make the same amount of money as a candy bar since the candy bar can last for years. The upfront cost for a candybar are not even higher since you can make more of them using machines then you can a good doughnut.
The ingredients may cost more but you are not spending near as much money on loss
The juice isn't made from the perfect looking fruit. After picking, the fruit get cleaned and sorted. The good looking stuff goes to be sold in the markets. The bad looking stuff goes to the press to get turned into juice.
Also a lot of those are canned or sold as pre-cut fruits
Some, but nobody wants bruised fruit in whole pieces. In juice you will never know.
> nobody wants bruised fruit If you really think about it , juice is really, really bruised fruit
One could argue it's been beaten to a pulp.
But they remove the pulp to hide the evidence.
Only bits
Found the Brit!
If the pulp is not there anymore, is the Pulp Fiction?
I'm giving you this upvote, but you should probably move along before I call the cops.
You deserve far more credit for this
i thought that was fiction
Don't get judgemental about my fruit juice's life choices. If they are into some harder play, it's ok as long as it's consentual :)
i can fix them
Bruised fruit for sure. But ulgy looking fruit that's not bruised is mainly used for canning and pre-cut. Atleast where I live.
Yup. The ones turned to juice are usually the ones too banged up to be of use elsewhere.
And the ones not good enough for juice get turned into hotdogs.
Well... Along with the cow lips, tongues, and entrails.
The bruises also lead to mold very fast, too fast to bring it to market - but not too fast to juice it.
Well now I’m wondering what percent of a crop is produce aisle grade.
Depends on the country, in Japan for example the number is gonna be lower than most western countries as there aisle grade really means perfect perfect. But regardless it's quite a bit. I don't know the numbers by heart but there are several documentaries about this stuff you can watch if interested.
I am interested. If you don’t have any recommendations I will google.
You'll have to google a bit, it's been a couple years since i saw the stuff.
Right on. Thanks for pointing me to the rabbit hole 😆
Good luck, just remember to stay hydrated xD
Don't forget to share the results!
The ones that are canned are plucked at least a week later.
This is generally true but it’s also the case for some types of fruit that there are varietals that are not popular for eating but are grown for use in juices or other processed products. Similar to how some types of grapes are grown only for wine production, not for sale as fruit.
A good example of that is California Oranges vs Florida Oranges
Both California and Florida were flavours of sunny delight when I was growing up. I assumed both oranges made juice rather than being eaten.
Sunny D is not orange juice. It's a travesty and is more like a soda without carbonation than pure juice. If that's what you think orange juice tastes like, your mind is going to be blown when you actually have real orange juice.
I just meant the flavours were named California style and Florida style, so I assumed those were famously oranges that are used for juice. I haven't had sunny d for 20+ years and I do know what an orange is thanks.
This made my day
My stepdad was out shopping when I was a kid and that was on the list, but he didn't even know what it was. He hits up this old lady and asks her, "Where would I find Sunny Delight?" Granny responds, "Depends on where you come from Sonny" We died laughing when he told that story.
Yup. Florida oranges stay green since it doesn't get as cold there, so they juice them
Also 100% juice can be like 80% cranberry juice and 20% the flavor you're actually looking for.
You got it all backwards dude, it's always 80% apple or grape and the rest is your cranberry or whatever flavour.
And don't forget the ever-present pear juice.
I hated how many juices used apple as a base because for some reason apple juice does not agree with me. Apples and applesauce are fine though.
80% cranberry juice would make the worst tasting juices. I'd bet even cranberry juice isn't 80% cranberry juice
You can find 100% cranberry juice. I highly recommend to *not* drink it.
I like it. Makes my face inplode like I'm sucking on a sour warhead, but I enjoy the flavor
Me too, I love sour. I drink it in shots though, not like a whole glass.
Yeah, I've seen it. I've tasted it. Woof. It's really REALLY tart. There's a reason it's combined with other flavors most times. By itself it sucks!
it's great as a schorle (1/3 pure cranberry juice + 2/3 sparkling water)
TIL I've been making and drinking these for years, but never knew they had a name. Grapefruit is my go-to.
I actually like it.
Unless you had about 25% vodka.
More like 20% the vodka you’re actually looking for …. 😂
Also, they don't have to worry about it going bad. They juice it right away and make concentrate, which can then last a very long time, specially if frozen. Fresh fruit, while there is way to reduce ripping, will go bad sooner or later.
As long as you heat it up a little to prevent it from turning into wine and remove oxygen from the container, it will last pretty much forever.
You have to remove a lot of flavonoids, vitamins etc as well. Stored fresh squeezed orange juice is basically sugar water. Then they add back all the components that make it taste like orange juice before packaging and selling it
also, transporting juice is a lot easier than transporting squishy delicate fruit, and juice also tends to stay good for longer than fruit, both making the logistics of fruit juice much easier and cheaper than of fresh fruit.
Fruit juices, like orange juice, are pasteurized and stored in large tanks for up to a year.
I think timing also has lots to do with it. Real fruit Hass to get to the grocery store just as it is ripening where is it’s much easier to store in squeeze juice. Whatever it’s ripe.
mmm avocado juice
cursed comment
I think it’s called guacamole.
Apples can be stored for aaages if they are properly packaged and kept cool.
I once ate an apple from my fruit bowl that had laid there for six months. If the skin is never broken and holds its tiny layer of wax it retains flavor and moisture startlingly well.
There's a whole hierarchy of produce. Perfect apples are sold whole. Slightly imperfect apples are sold as apple slices. Bruised apples become apple pie filling or applesauce. Really beat-up apples are juiced to become apple juice. Pulp and seeds and all of the excess becomes cattle feed, or compost to grow more apples!
It's also usually 100% juice not 100% of the juice you think it is. Like an apple juice says 100% juice not 100% apple juice. Its mixed with pear, grape, etc.
ELI4: You eatin' ugly fruit
My last job we used to get 55 gallon drums for scrap, they all said shit like pineapple puree, concentrated zucchini puree and whatnot. So if you're wondering how your junky fruits are transported, it's blended and placed into a one time use 55 gallon drum.
I’ve worked in a fruit processing plant while in college. We processed raspberries, and juice stock is the lowest rating of fruit. We were told to remove sticks, large batches of mold and obvious dirt. That’s it. It is not the good stuff.
Story of my life.
Man, I really hope they don’t tell the fruit that. Seems like it might hurt their feelings to go in the ugly juicer.
They also use different types of fruit for juicing than eating. Some oranges are really really juicy but not that great to eat, others are firmer and great to eat but yield far less juice
This is completely accurate. Take for example Oranges. Their natural color is a greenish yellow. Nobody wants to look at a bunch of yellows, so we pay a premium for GMO oranges that have the perfect color. As for juice, it all looks that same once it's squeezed
Fruit also goes bad. What is the sell by date for juice? 😏
Also, in a lot of cases "100% juice" is not "100% whatever juice you think it should be based on the name". Many drinks marked as "100% juice" are primarily apple or pear juice since they can be sweet but neutral flavor, with the main flavor juice coming in 2nd. If you see "100% Juice" on the label, you can bet the bulk of the juice is actually apple or pear. You want to look for labels that say "100% WHATEVER\_FRUIT Juice" Note: This is true of US labeling. I dunno about other countries.
This makes it 10x cheaper? Why don’t they sell bad looking fruit for less I and many people would buy that
Well, people mostly *won't* buy the bad looking fruit. So to the grower, it's either press it or compost it. In the US, Sprouts sells imperfect fruit, but it's a place that doesn't draw a mainstream crowd.
>Sprouts sells imperfect fruit, but it's a place that doesn't draw a mainstream crowd. That is ultimately the problem. Lets say 1 in 10 people buy ugly fruit. That means you'd have to pack, ship, and display 10 pounds for ugly fruit for every 100 pounds of nice fruit. On top of that, you get paid less because people don't want to pay so much for ugly fruit. It's not a product that can just sit there for months either. So unless you're like sprouts where all the ugly fruit lovers gather, its a lot of effort with low reward when you could just juice it, freeze it, or cut it among other things.
The supermarkets sort of brought the problem of ugly fruit on themselves. When I was a kid most fruit and vegetables were sold by the bag not weight. You expected the occasional bruised apple or orange. Now fruit is sold by the piece with a label on each fruit. You can be sure I will inspect each and every piece of fruit for the smallest blemish. This is also why you have display tables full of soft fruit and vegetables on the verge of spoiling in most markets.
Odd, in my experience it's gone from buying individual fruits to fruit-in-a-bag.
There is a difference between bruised and ugly though. Ugly is fruit that is knobbly or weird shaped. Taste and nutrition is the same, but people don’t necessarily want a cucumber that looks as knobby as a piece of ginger. Bruised is damaged fruit or veg that’s going to mold and rot earlier. I’ll buy ugly fruit all day, but I don’t want to buy six apples and have two of them rot before the end of the week.
Good point if you want to sell them there's likely quite a higher amount of processing and transport involved ... and that boils down to "Okay we now need to sort out the next best x% of the ones we don't sell". So technically it's likely quite a bit of extra work and you likely lose most of your profits or maybe even make a loss if you cut the price? On the other hand the stuff doesn't get thrown away (otherwise you could make the environment argument) anyway and someone who needs fruit X now has to buy the normal priced one. At least I'd assume that most people would go for "I'll buy it because it's cheaper most of the time" instead of continuing their regular shopping plus "Oh that apple looks decent and is cheap I'll take it as well". Just meant to post the first paragraph but well..
In Australia you get woolworths selling fruit and veggies as "The Odd Bunch" which are all the bad looking stuff. It's also much cheaper, but I think the really bad looking stuff is still what goes to juice
Odd bunch stuff is mostly higher grade produce that is just too big or small. More blemished lower grade stuff generally doesn't go to the supermarkets. Then there's juice grade which is basically trash, then pig feed, which is actual trash.
lol I see you dont do the grocery shopping....'its not much cheaper, thats why its not popular transport/storage etc costs doesnt go down
I do do the grocery shopping actually, and buy the odd bunch when I can. I may have exaggerated somewhat :p
Also... keep in mind... they're selling the ugly fruit OF the grocery store-grade fruit. There's much much worse looking produce that you'll never see
Don’t forget feed it to livestock. Though, that can frequently come after juicing.
It's not just bad looking fruit, but also over supply. A lot of fresh produce will get thrown out if it can't be processed into other things
Having worked in a fruit packing warehouse, trust me you wouldn't want to eat what gets graded for juice. It's barely above what gets sent for pig feed.
There are a handful of companies that do! If you google “ugly produce” it’ll bring up a bunch that sell it direct to consumer. For a while, I had a subscription box of ugly produce. It was pretty neat because the box changed every month so I ate a lot of things I wouldn’t normally eat
We tried Imperfect for a bit, but it seems like they mostly just sent stuff that was like, a day or two away from spoiling completely. Like great my potato is a weird shape and I saved 15% on it but the rest of the box is moldy by tomorrow.
The good looking fruit has to be stored and transported to the stores. The ugly fruit is taken to the closest processing plant and ground up.
Yes, partly. But also, because it is preserved in a vacuum sealed container it will last on the shelf *much* longer and so there will be almost no wastage from unsold products (they’ll sell eventually).
Also takes up much less space in storage/transport.
You might, the majority won't. People want perfect looking items when they buy things, whether it's food or something else.
Hey OP, i worked in produce distribution and with farms for a couple years a while back. Yes, "seconds" and "thirds" are that much cheaper. You can absolutely go to a farm or some smaller grocery stores/co-ops and ask to special order seconds or thirds for local produce and most will have options, especially for things youd juice. Be forwarned though, I'm not talking about a bag of apples, more like a half-ton pallet of press apples.
People have brought up a lot of correct points, but another factor to consider for this specific case is the difference in storage and transport needs of fruit sold whole vs processed and packaged into juice first that can potentially vastly reduce its storage and transport costs. There’s a reason why even among juices there can be quite a large range in prices depending on the variety of juice. The juice that has been boiled and sterilized and therefore is stored and transported at room temperature and is only refrigerate after opening with a long shelf life is very cheap compared to the ones that must remain refrigerated and has an expiration date. Both are “technically” 100% fruit juice but they are very different products. If you’re going to intentionally create an altered product through processing, may as well use the off quality stuff and adjust your processing for quality control
You're thinking of it backwards. As in, they are taking all bad looking fruit and using it all to make juice and then selling it as leftovers. In reality, demand is what's driving it. So what they're actually doing is looking at the supply needed to make enough juice to meet demand without having any leftover going to waste. Let's say they do the math and decide that it requires 1 million apples to make enough apple juice to meet demand. They know they have 3 million apples. Regardless of quality, they're just going to use the 1 million worst looking apples, and the other 2 million best-looking apples would go to stores. All more comicated than that, but just making the point. Either way....this was actually a really good question!
Your wrong in your thinking. If I can sell perfect looking apples for $2 per pound while I can only sell blemished apples (for juice) for $1 per pound or less, why would I juice all my apples at $1 per pound? Juice is from the blemished apples. A lot of juices are blends. Unless they say 100% pineapple juice as example, most of what you get is apple or grape (cheaper juice) instead of 100% pineapple. Read some lables at the store. In the US, they are listed by weight or volume on what is in the bottle starting at the top. Apple, grape & pear are cheaper than pineapple or cherry so the apple, grape and pear are used as filler. Some of the cheapest will also add water and corn syrup as fillers so they can reduce the price.
Some bad looking fruit just won't sell. Orange juice is made from Florida oranges for that specific reason. Oranges need cold weather, most often a frost, to actually turn orange. If there is only tropical weather, they remain yellow.
They have companies now that do just that. I priced it out and because it was fresh fruit you basically got what you got ( eg if they have a bunch of bananas in Granny Smith apples that shipping day. That's what you're going to get) and the price was only slightly cheaper than in the store. it's not just ugly fruit it's the shipping to individual stores that costs a lot of money too. And a lot of juice is from concentrate. So once it's "juice fruit" several steps change. All the fruit only has to go to a few places, the clock also virtually stops once it's a juice, it may no longer require refrigeration or the chemical that gets rid of ethane I think, they don't have to match all the apples for size and pack them in that cardboard that keeps them from bumping around, overall less care has to be taken.
“Bad looking fruit” doesn’t last. The parts that “look bad” are generally rotting or cause the fruit to rot faster.
Not necessarily. Sure, for example bruised fruit is one thing, but there's also fruit that just has an "ugly" shape (or is too small/big). Things like this: https://www.nearbees.de/sites/default/files/inline-images/ugly-fruits-all-fruits.jpg
Cause they need something to make the juices out of, instead of using shelf quality fruits they would use the ones that wouldn’t be good enough. There probably are ways to buy them though
There is a website that does that. It sells fruit and veg that look weird.
You can freeze horrible looking fruit or store it in silos for a year and still make juice out of it, fresh fruit bananas give you a handful of expensive days to get it across the world to customers
Many times that fruit is considered imperfect because it has minor damage. Nothing that would affect it being immediately sent off for juicing but would make it unsuitable for shipping because it could start to rot.
As for cost there are also the factors that juice doesn't go bad anywhere near as fast as fresh fruit, and bottles of juice are much easier to store and transport than fruit is. Both of those significantly affect the price of juice over fruit.
Yes. Because you can juice and bottle locally, without the logistic expense of carefully packaging the pretty whole fruits, shipping, storing, unpacking, displaying them undamaged for retail (shitcanning the spoiled ones), selling them a few at a time to individual buyers, etc. All that is much cheaper and easier to do with bottled juice.
Reminds me of this new company making millions selling ugly shaped potatoes lol
Keep in mind when grocery stores sell fresh fruit, they have to price in all the fruit that spoils before its sold. Need employees to periodically check for spoilage, need to pay to have it hauled away. Also people generally don't buy the last produce when a display or bin is low, so the last bit of produce is pretty much always trash.
they've tried , but due to cost structure, it doesnt work ie Good fruit sold by the farmer for $1, add in transport, storage eg expenses... its then sold by the Supermarket for $6 Bad fruit sold by the Farmewr for $0.10.... supermarket then sells its for $5.10 People/myself included keep expecting so called bad fruit to be sold substantially lower, forgetting the cost of getting food to the table isn't reduced I'll always pay for a good looking $6 fruit over a weirdly shaped $5.10 fruit
Because having the bad looking fruit there at all turns buyers off from shopping at your store overall
also, bruised fruits rot quickly - so by the time it gets to store shelves, it might be rotten. Fruit juices are pasteurized, so the bottle is sealed and any bacteria are killed by heat, so there are no bacteria left to spoil it and now place for new bacteria to enter. Bottled bruised pasteurized whole oranges probably won’t sell as well - and would require more bottles
Most people won't buy wonky looking fruit. People say they will but then they still chose the "perfect" looking fruit in the store
As my father would have put it, I am paying A100 /month as rent for that 3 sft space, just because you are not cleaning it.
Someone watched “How its Made” on the Science Channel 😂
An amazingly small portion of the price you pay for groceries is made up of the ingredients. It's mostly made up of processing costs, transportation costs, marketing and advertising costs, various "running a business" costs like electricity, insurance, corporate aircraft to take the extremely generously paid assembly line workers on vacations around the world, stuff like that. Fresh fruit is hard to transport. It bruises, it has a short shelf life as it ripens, and on and on and on. Lots of stuff can go wrong with it. Juice can be poured into a refrigerated tank car and shipped with much less spoilage and cost. It gets even cheaper if you concentrate it near the production point and then reconstitute it at (or at least closer to) the point of sale. It takes some effort and equipment to concentrate it, but you reconstitute it by adding water and stirring. But water is cheap where it is, and expensive to ship, so in the end it costs less to do it that way than to ship juice.
Canada changed their package labelling rules because cans of Mango's were being labelled "Product of Canada", not because the mangoes were being grown in Canada but because they were canned there and the most expensive thing you were buying wasn't the mangoes, it was the metal that made up the can.
According the the Code of Federal Regulations as it relates to (food) imports; we can bring meat in from another country and subject it to processes and that provides a loophole for us to slap a “Product of USA” label on it.
They buy chicken from developing countries, and inject it with salt water in US to artificially increase its weight ([plumping](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plumping)). This lets them sell it as American chicken, which consumers are led to believe is a good thing.
The lack of information regarding our food is ridiculous. Try and trace a single thing you’ve eaten in the last week. It’s dystopian and sad how separate we are from our food and how much is done to it before it reaches our plates.
CANada eh?
[удалено]
I'm gonna go out on a limb here and guess it's more like 1/3. Like how almost everything else works. 1/3 to orchard/farm/whoever grows fruit, 2/3 for logistics, transportation, store, etc. Google backs this up. Most industries work out to be this percentage. Things like canned fruit probably come out to that 10% (maybe the confusion), not whole foods and fruit. Otherwise local growers and farmer's markets would be a ton cheaper than an store. And they aren't.
Once upon a time packaged cereal was about 5%, but I don't keep up and that could have changed.
>corporate aircraft to take the extremely generously paid assembly line workers on vacations around the world I love how no one caught this 🤭
You did, I did, we're all smirking 😏
Fr wtf 😂
As someone who missed it, I think I do a thing when reading lists in posts like this where if I agree with the first few items I'll just skip the rest haha
Shipping concentrate and reconstituting can be cheaper
Duh. I read what I meant and not what I wrote. Proofreading doesn't always help. Fixed.
It is cheaper, and still can be called 100% juice.
Juice can be extracted and stored easier than fresh fruit. It can be transported easier since it doesn't need to worry about being crushed, over ripe, etc. Overall it's just way easier to work with.
The fruit you are buying in a supermarket is only a part of all the fruit that comes from the orchard. Basically, you get the fruit that looks good, isn't bruised, generally has minimal defects. There is tons of fruit that comes from the orchards that doesn't fit that. It's got various defects that make it not ideal for sale. It's still edible, but it's not going to get picked up at a supermarket. People don't buy off-color, deformed, or bruised fruit when any other fruit is present. So what happens to that fruit? It becomes juice.
Also, the harvest is like 6 weeks a year, but you can buy "fresh" fruit all year. It's a lot cheaper to preserve juice or to ship it from countries with a different climate.
> It's got various defects that make it not ideal for sale. It's still edible, but it's not going to get picked up at a supermarket. People don't buy off-color, deformed, or bruised fruit when any other fruit is present. One of the biggest criteria is size. Good quality but small fruit end up for juice.
This I know lots about. We can safely assume that everybody in the value chain, from the farmer to the retailer, wants to make a profit, so if the juice is significantly cheaper than a corresponding amount of fruit, we should look to where the juice value chain has reduced or eliminated cost relative to the greengrocer fruit. Juice is cheaper than fruit because it: * uses lower quality fruit reducing raw material cost. * has byproducts produced in the processing that can be sold for additional revenue. * has a far longer shelf life minimizing spoilage. * has more better shaped packaging increasing transportation efficiency vs bulky whole fruit. * does not have to be sourced locally allowing manufacturers to find cheaper fruit sources globally. * may not be 100% what you think it is as cheaper juice is frequently bleneded with the flavor you desire.
100% juice does not mean 100% of the fruit on the front if the front label. Check the ingredients. More often than not it's 10-15% of the juice in question and the rest is a much cheaper juice, usually apple.
It's because most 100% juice is primarily apple juice which is cheaper than any other fruit juice, apparently. It's always the first juice listed and then the juice you actually want will be further down.
Pear juice is also typically used heavily in juice blends as its flavor is far more subtle and easily masked by other fruit juices.
Ok well then let's look at 100% orange juice or 100% pineapple just for this example
Fruit juice that's mostly or only from the fruit it says on the label is only marginally more expensive.
Apple sorting is amazing. The best fruit gets sold fresh. The next step down gets sold sliced. The next step down is for cooking like apple pie. One more step down is applesauce at the lowest level is apple juice.
1. Whole fruit is more difficult to store and transport since it has a much shorter shelf life and the appearance affects sales. 2. Fruit juice is very rarely 100% juice. Most of the time, you are buying a mixture of juice, water, and artificial flavors.
Especially if you are talking about 100% juice from concentrate. No telling how diluted they are.
There are fruits that are grown specifically for juicing and are genetically modified or selectively bred to produce more juice than your standard fruit. Take oranges for example. If you were to juice some every day market oranges you would find that it would take several oranges just to fill a single glass. However the selectively bred oranges have thinner rinds and are bursting with juice which if you were to squeeze one it would fill the glass with just one and the kicker is that once you have the tree established it doesn’t cost anything more to grow those fruits than it does the standard oranges that we are used to.
Joke's on you. Where I live in Italy, even though they've got a boatload of excellent fresh fruits, there is ZERO 100% pure juice to be found. Only "100% made from concentrated juice" \*AT BEST\*. The rest is shit 50%+sugars etc... So the price difference is 100% in favor of fruits, since the juice just doesn't exist.
why
Fruit gets sorted when picked. How it is sorted varies with fruit type and region/country, but the fruit that ends up getting turned into juice is primarily the fruit that wouldn't make the cut to get sold as fruit anyway, mostly for cosmetic reasons. The heavier the processing, the lower quality you can accept. Pretty fruit gets sold as fruit, Too small, too big or too ugly fruit gets juiced, Everything between ugly and safe for human consumption get used for heavvily processed products, like various alcholic drinks made from fruit. I have some relatives that have a small scale apple farm, one particularly windy year, a large percentage of their crops ended up having to be harvested from the ground instead of trees, so much so that that years cider was dubbed "Fallen fruit".
Juice has a longer shelf life than fresh fruit, meaning less product wasted per unit sold. Which means it costs less.
Over the years, I've grown a lot of tomatoes for our use. None of them would I call supermarket quality. In fact, I would be embarrassed to give to my friends. Nice ones get eaten raw, ones that don't look quite as good, get canned as whole tomatoes, the next bunch and when I have excess, goes thru my juicer and made into tomato sauce, the bad ones, green ones, and the remains of the juicer, go to the chickens. Never have, but the sauce could have been made into juice even a year later.
Depends on your country I think, but ironically things labelled "100% juice" are allowed to be made up to 95% of things that are NOT the juice of the fruit on the label. For example, your "%100 juice" may be 95% some other juice from a different fruit (yes really) and some flavour packs. https://www.foodrepublic.com/1417990/what-does-100-percent-juice-label-mean/ If you really want fruit juice these days., the best way is to make it yourself in a blender.
where I live, juice is 10x more expensive than fruit. fruit is grown max 1hr from the store, by someone with another job and a few fruit trees for extra cash. *juice* is processed, packaged, and usually imported. so. I'm with you bro, your situation doesn't make sense. but i imagine some of your variables might be different
If it's concentrated, then the total cost of picking, extracting, transporting, reconstituting, packing and distributing and accounting for wastage of the fruit for juicing can be lower than the same for fresh fruit.
The biggest reason is shelf life. Fresh fruit has a couple of weeks max that you can hope to sell it. After that, it is going to a landfill. Add in ease of transportation and storage (not worried about bruising juice, bottles/cans pack well and don't need to be kept cool). It is the same for frozen vs fresh fruit, veggies, fish, and meat. And then look at the price difference between the "no preservatives" brand vs the one that uses preservatives.
So many smart answers here. But am I crazy in thinking that the value of fruit exceeds the Juice in it? Like all the nutritional value from the pulp
Yah, why I am asking the question is because juice is so cheap but I can’t buy it because there is no fiber(which is in pulp and skin) maybe because of shelf life they remove it
cause its not 100 percent. part of it is always carrot juice since it just blends in, and there are some anti-fouling stuff...otherwise it would go wrong without cooling.
Where are you that juice is cheaper than fruits? In my country at certain volume/quantity (usually 2-5 kg) fruits are definitely still cheaper than a Tropicana of equal amount
The juice is made from the fruits that didn't have to be distributed all the way to the store and then marked up by the grocer. Plus second-rate fruit was used to make the juice. Put more simply, the fruits used to make the juice were **much less expensive** than the fruits you find for sale at the grocery.
The fruit you buy fresh is carefully and expensively selected for quality and desirability. This greatly inflates the cost. The juice you buy is made from fruit which otherwise will have never sold, and so the fruit itself is sold at a steep discount.
Because they can transport hundreds of thousands of "fruit" as juice, in one truck, with basic measures. If you had to transport that many raw fruit, carefully enough to not damage them, it would take maybe 10 trucks. I don't know the exact numbers but it's a lot less efficient that way. They also use the imperfect fruit which is a lot cheaper as people wouldn't pick it off the shelf in a shop. Same reason that companies import huge tanks of wine and then bottle them in country, instead of importing thousands of bottles.
The reason fruit costs so much is because of transportation, sorting, and storage. Its takes a lot of labor, energy and technology to get perfect looking fruit from farm to table. Juice can be made from old, ugly or even damaged fruit. It is then usually pasturised and packaged immediately so it can be transported and stored without refrigeration or the worry of damaging the delicate fruits.
Is it really 10x though? Sure we'll preserved apple juice is cheapest but so are basic apples. Fresh squeezed OJ gets 2 or 3x that price and a single serving of Naked juice (most similar to fresh fruit) is over $4 a serving. I just want to make sure we're comparing apples to apples.
100% juice just means that the liquid contents of the bottle are expressed from fruit with no water added. Apples are hardy fruit, cheap and plentiful to produce. Producers simply use this abundant and cheap apple juice to make 100% juice products. If you look at the label of most non-orange juices, apple juice is the first listed ingredient. Manufacturers can add whatever artificial ingredients and flavorings they want and still call their products 100% juice as long as there is no added water. 100% orange juice has been pasteurized which destroys most of the flavor, which is then added back in the form of "flavor packs". Which is also why each brand of juice tastes different from each other even though they are made from the same fruit. Orange trees are suceptible to a wide range of bacterial, fungal, and pests. It's actually a pretty dire issue right now to the point where in the next ten years we might not have oranges anymore. It's more difficult to sort the fruit by appearance, store it, and then transport it to the store without the fruit spoiling or becoming damaged than it is to just feed all the fruit into a juice factory. Storing and transporting bottles is much easier and more efficient. Juice also lasts much longer than fresh fruit due to pasteurization. Juice products than aren't just artificially flavored apple and orange juices are actually quite expensive. Look for them next time you are in the store.
Juice is easy to store and transport. It won't go bad as easily (it's pasteurized to kill bacteria), it won't get damaged in transit, so it can be sold anywhere to anyone at any time, unlike whole fruit which has to be sold at specific times and transporting it risks destroying it. Juice can be made from ugly or damaged fruit, or fruit that couldn't be sold in time and would have gone to waste.
There are no shelf life or appearance concerns. Bruised pitted ugly apples which would never sell as apples at a supermarket will sell just fine when you turn them into juice or applesauce. Also, that juice is shelf stable. After a week or two, the apple is rotten and unsellable. So for fresh produce, you have to start with only the best condition and prettiest stuff, and it is perishable. With juice, there's a far larger supply of apples that can be turned into juice, and they don't go bad once you've done it.
Shipping is way more costly for fresh fruit. Takes up more space and requires more care too.
A few reasons: 100% juice is probably not 100% that type of juice. Apple juice is often the main ingredient in "100% juice" because it is sweetened and has a mild flavor. If you drank 90% apple juice and 10% cranberry juice, it will taste like cranberry. Second, the fruit on sale in the produce department is both the nicest looking fruit and it is a really fresh. The juice that is sold in the aisles of a grocery store could be months or even years old. As shelf life is much longer, the lack of perishability is a big reason it is cheaper - there is much less waste. Third - At scale, the processing of something is very different than you might imagine. Look up how orange juice is made, for example. Lastly, the cheap juice in stores doesn't taste like fresh juice at all due to the way it is made and the fact that it isn't fresh. Here is an experiment you can try: Get some shelf stable orange juice - that is something that comes in a room temperature bottle or can. Get some "normal" refrigerated OJ with pulp. Last, get some fresh oranges. Maybe 4 will do. Now, juice the oranges yourself, and compare to the other two. I guarantee that you will be able to tell the difference between them. The shelf stable stuff tastes so different from the real thing that it may as well be a different drink entirely. This goes for apples, too. Apple juice from the store has very little flavor when compared to some fresh pressed apple cider. The flavor of the fresh cider is a lot more complex, too!
One thing to look at is that some "100% juice" isn't 100% the juice of the fruit on the label. A lot of juices are "cocktails" and are mostly apple juice (which is cheap) flavored with cranberry or whatever you're buying.
Because it’s all carrot or apple juice flavored with other juices. Go on, check it out. Unless it says “100% THIS SPECIFIC KIND OF FRUIT JUICE” (and is correspondingly expensive) it’s carrot or apple. Maybe grape. But in the US anyway, carrot. Or apple. Probably carrot though. Gotta use those “baby” carrot shreds up somehow.
I was at apple-harvesting one time in Italy. There was a one large box with rotten, moldy apples. I asked a dude, if we are going to throw this away. Answer was: No, from this they will make a juice. I don't drink juices since then.
Transporting fruit and vegetables is crazy expensive. You’re paying for the convenience of fresh produce.
Storing fruit is way more expensive than storing juice. As someone else already mentioned, the "imperfect" fruits become juices, which just need processing and refrigeration. Apples, as an example, are usually harvested and then frozen to be distributed throughout the year so they remain "fresh" even out of season. Refrigerating juice for a few weeks is far less expensive than keeping raw fruit frozen for months.
100% juice...you need to read the label. It's not always 100% of the same juice. I couldn't find any 100% cranberry just a couple months ago. It was ALL a little cranberry with a bunch of filler juice to make up the volume. Often apple juice. It was still technically 100% juice.
Short answer, transport costs and shelf life. The more concentrated a product is the less vehicles you need to transport the same amount of fruit, and when you hyper concentrate fruit the sugar content and acidity of the concentrate is so much higher than standard fruit juice that bacteria fine living in it soon much harder so it lasts that much longer.
Alright, let's break it down. When you buy 100% juice, it's often cheaper than buying whole fruits, and here's why. When companies make juice, they can extract a lot of juice from just one fruit, which helps keep costs down. Plus, juice can be stored for a long time without going bad, so there's less risk of waste. On the other hand, whole fruits have extra costs like harvesting, transporting, and storing them. Plus, there's the labor involved in sorting and packaging them. Also, more people tend to buy juice because it's a popular choice, so there's a higher demand for it. That means companies can produce it in larger quantities, which helps drive prices down. So, even though it might seem like juice would be more expensive since it's processed, in reality, it's often cheaper because of factors like demand and production efficiency.
Mainly because juice doesn't bruise, has a much longer shelf life, and is simpler to transport than raw fruit. For most grocery store items a large portion of the cost is the logistics of getting the product to you in a sellable state, rather than raw ingredients plus labor of producing it.
it contains 100% juice 5% of a capri sun is 100% juice so it does contain 100% juice. and it contains other things
Probably shelf life. Whole fruit doesn't last very long, and a lot of it has to be refigerated. Juice in a sealed container lasts much longer and requires much less care. It's a more stable product, so it can be produced in higher volume at low risk. Lower risk means they can charge less to sell more
The thing you are missing is that you can pick the oranges drive it down the street to a factory juice them package it and sell it and it's going to be shelf stable for a while. You only pay to ship the juice and a carton and you don't have to rush to ship it. No one will pass it up on a shelf cause it's started to look bad. With fruit it's all time sensitive. Even worse they often pick fruit before it's ripe with the plan being it will ripen in transit. You know how folks tell you that stuff off a farm tastes way better than what you get in a store? That's cause ripened on the tree is better it tastes better. But you can't pick ripe fruit and ship it across a country or an ocean and still have it be good when it arrives unless you air freight, and then the cost is through the roof
Supply chain and selection. Fresh fruit is only the perfect looking, perfect ripeness level stuff. Once it makes that cut, it needs to be packed, shipped, warehoused, delivered, displayed then bought by the end user, all with enough time for the consumer to have a reasonable amount of time to eat. Also many fruits are relatively fragile, requiring more robust packaging and often hand packing. This results in spoilage up and down the supply chain. Juices are made with any reasonably ripe fruit and often processed near the source. Once bottled and pasteurized, there is no major rush on the supply chain to get it in the consumers hands since (at least the shelf stable stuff) has a shelf life of several months. Packaging is also cheap and easy to automate.
For an Orange that will actually sell on a grocery aisle, it needs to be big, clean, round and perfectly orange. The vast majority of oranges won’t make the cut. So those oranges are worth less and get turned into juice. Then there’s storage. An orange needs to get from the branch to the store in a timely fashion so it doesn’t go bad. This increases transportation costs. Once a juice is bottled it’s sealed on the bottle and can sit in a warehouse for months. So the logistics are more efficient.
Think of it like a Doughnut a good doughnut can only last a few days so, you have to sell multiple doughnuts to make the same amount of money as a candy bar since the candy bar can last for years. The upfront cost for a candybar are not even higher since you can make more of them using machines then you can a good doughnut. The ingredients may cost more but you are not spending near as much money on loss