I Just Can’t Concentrate – Or How Frozen Orange Juice Is Going Extinct
It was about a week ago that the news hit – the Coca Cola company is discontinuing Minute Maid frozen orange juice concentrate. And I am trying to decide exactly how I feel about this development.
For those of us of a certain age, two or three cans of “orange juice” in the freezer was a normal thing. Who does not remember pulling on the little plastic tab and peeling the lid from the paper can so we could plop the frozen orange ingot into a pitcher. Three cans of tap water then completed the orange juice, which the advertisers told us was as good as “fresh squeezed”. Yes, I skipped over just how hard it was to get the frozen juice nugget to break apart and become wholly mixed with the water. Which is why we usually took a can out of the freezer a few hours before mixing it.
Did you know that there was no such thing as frozen orange (or any other kind) juice concentrate before 1946? And even when the product crept into grocery store freezers, it was the end product of years of research by the U.S. Government and the Florida Department of Citrus.
From the start of WWII, America’s military worked hard to get decent nutrition to soldiers in the field. Vitamin C was an important component of that, but the best they could manage were lemon crystals that tasted awful. Late in the war, Boston’s National Research Corporation (NRC) developed a method for dehydrating medicines. That development led to the 1945 formation of a subsidiary called Florida Foods Corporation, which got a government contract for 500,000 pounds of powdered orange juice. The war ended later that year, but not before much work had been done on a solution to a very basic problem.
Orange juice had been something that you got from squeezing oranges – as Sunkist was happy to tell you as it sold you as many whole oranges as you could carry. Unfortunately, natural, fresh orange juice had a very short shelf life before it began to deteriorate. The new company decided that instead of complete dehydration into a powder, a better way was to remove 80% of the water from fresh orange juice and to freeze it. The frozen concentrate had a very long shelf life without preservatives, and a superior taste. The first cans were shipped in April, 1946, just as the company was renamed Vacuum Foods Corporation. That new product was given the name of Minute Maid.
The product was slow to take off, with company president John M. Fox doing door-to-door demonstrations for two money-losing years. However, the stuff turned out to be that proverbial “better mousetrap” and by 1948 the company could afford to sponsor Bing Crosby on the radio. Crosby would become a pitchman for Minute Maid for the next several years. Der Bingle was surely at least partly responsible for the number of Minute Maid processing plants, which quickly jumped from three to ten.
Like in this early television commercial from 1954. From the beginning, the pitch was that Minute Maid was “better for your health”, with more vitamins and minerals and with fewer impurities than in “fresh squeezed”. Competitors like Bird’s Eye and Snow Crop soon jumped in and cans of frozen orange juice concentrate were in home freezers from coast to coast. The company became so big that Coca-Cola bought it in 1960.
And boy did that ad campaign (and those that followed) work! Is there anyone over, say, age 50, who did not grow up with a perpetual pitcher of OJ in the fridge? In my own house, a glass of orange juice was poured every day for breakfast, whether that breakfast was bacon and eggs or just cold cereal. And who doesn’t remember the sinking feeling of pouring the last glass from the pitcher, knowing that it was now up to you to mix up a fresh batch?
So, what happened? First off there was Tropicana. That Florida company developed a flash pasteurization process in 1954 that allowed ready-to-drink orange juice to be transported and shipped to stores in a fleet of refrigerated train cars. Minute Maid eventually caved and offered its own ready-to-drink OJ in 1973.
There have also been changes in consumer tastes. Health groups have slagged on orange juice for its high sugar content, and many of us who grew up on the stuff have moved on to other things to drink with our breakfasts. And finally there has been an onslaught of bad weather and disease that has battered the American citrus industry, particularly in Florida. The especially nasty Citrus Greening Disease, a bacterium that infects orange trees causing green, bitter tasting fruit, hit Florida in 2005 and California in 2012. It has been reported that American citrus production has been cut in half because of the blight, which has proved difficult to control and impossible to eradicate.
With problems on both the supply and demand sides of the frozen orange juice business, it is understandable that Coca-Cola (which still owns Minute Maid) has chosen to get out of that niche altogether. The recent announcement indicated that the closure of the unit will occur in the first calendar quarter of 2026, and that the final cans will disappear once stores have sold out. Now I know that on my next trip to the store, I had better get myself a can (or three). I cannot say that I have a deep craving for frozen orange juice, but I also know that if I want to experience it again I had better not tarry. And neither had you.
J. P.'s Blog 
I wonder if this portends the end of the store brands of frozen OJ as well.
My childhood family was a big frozen OJ consumer as well. It was one of those products that had talismanic health properties, according to my mom (who was a big Bing Crosby fan, so there you have it). Shirley you must remember the cans that existed prior to the new-fangled plastic strip holding the lid on. I recall regularly struggling with one of those janky thin metal grocery store can openers to make a jagged can opening…and being warned countless times to WATCH OUT and DON’T CUT YOURSELF. That described breakfast most of my mornings in the 1960s and 1970s.
We started buying the stuff again when my kids were young and their tastes varied so much that we could never count on them drinking the same thing for breakfast one day to the next; and thus having liquid OJ in the fridge was a recipe for spoilage. So, we’d have a can of frozen concentrate and mix it up by the spoonful when needs/tastes dictated. There’s probably an open can still there in one of the freezers.
This history (yours of frozen OJ, not my kids’ weird dietary habits) is also a great connection to the post-WWII history of home appliances. There’d have been no Minute Maid but for the introduction of home refrigerator-freezer combinations…which of course really got moving shortly after the War….with fish sticks, Swanson dinners, and Birdseye peas/strawberries in-tow.
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That’s a great point about the home freezer becoming common enough to support something like frozen OJ. And I had a total mental block about the cans that we had to open with a can opener. Now I am remembering that our method was to use the little pointy end of the thing we opened pop bottles with for two triangular holes in the lid. The thawed concentrate poured out and we filled and emptied the 3x of water through those holes too. Your way was certainly faster, but I never cut myself. 🙂
I also remember Bing Crosby doing Minute Maid ads in the 70s, and had no idea at the time that he had been hawking the stuff for its entire existence.
That’s a good question on store branded versions. Marianne reminded me last night that we have an old hot punch recipe that requires one can of OJ concentrate. And not the regular size can, but the small one they have not sold for several years. So we might have a half-full can of concentrate somewhere in our freezer too.
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“little pointy end of the thing we opened pop bottles with”
Church key. Did you also have childhood BB gun with a thing in the stock that tells time? ;^)
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I keep forgetting that it was called a church key. My mother just called it a bottle opener.
On the BB gun, I did not!
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I have a diet that includes me drinking grapefruit juice daily, also available as a frozen can, when and if I can find it! Even unfrozen grapefruit juice is hard to find, and some large grocery stores don’t even carry it. Juice has gotten so expensive, and frozen can juice so comparatively cheap, that I had to try some a few years ago just to save money. It was such an annoyance, that it was a “one and done” for me. What a drag to make. I remember a frozen can thawing on our counter all the time as a kid, but not so much when I was older. Now, buying “ready-to-drink” juice, even on my fixed income, is just one of those little luxuries I’m unwilling to give up! I live in a pretty poor area, with people who are considered the “working poor”: coffee baristas, Target shelf stacker, Walmart parking lot cart shaggers, etc. I live here because it’s what I can afford in retirement. You would be amazed at how many people here get third part food deliveries, i.e. Grub Hub, Door Dash, whatever. Hugely expensive for people not making much, and I will bet dollars to donuts, this generation isn’t going to be putting up with sloppy frozen cans on their counters waiting to thaw, and messy mixing, just to get a bit of juice!
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That’s a great point I had not thought of – how the generation who craves the convenience of Door Dash will not put up with the hassle of mixing a pitcher of orange juice. There is also that there are so many more households of only 1 or 2 people today, and a whole pitcher of juice can be hard for a small household to get through.
Your mention of Door Dash is interesting. I could afford it as an occasional luxury, but if I am going to do a take-out dinner I will drive out myself to get it and bring it home. I am willing to spend the gas and time to get it myself because I figure I can get it home faster and hotter than some underpaid gig worker will.
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And also because you have the innate curiosity – even if it’s perhaps subconscious – to simply see what’s outside of your doorstep. Getting in the car and driving somewhere is but one way of exploring the day to day physical world, and making that physical world part of your experience. I fear that we as a culture are turning away from such experiences…and that can’t really be a good thing.
This actually does relate to frozen orange juice. Or at least the ability to fondly recall experiences with something like a consumer product of the past.
And yeah, I also totally agree about the food being hotter if I go get the takeout myself.
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Ditto re: Door Dash… How lazy can one actually get? And yes, it’ll be fresher (whether that’s hot or cold), if you pick it up yourself. My friend and I joke all the time about how much cheaper it is to brew premium coffee at home, but eventually you have to get out and see what the world is up to! That’s the indie coffee shop for me. You can only stay home 24/7 for a few days!
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A freezer inspection just now revealed we are out of frozen OJ. That’s too bad. We weren’t regular partakers, but it sure was handy and generally yielded a lesser quantity than the Tropicana style of ready to go juice. Come to think of it, we’ve even migrated away from acquiring grape juice frozen.
Jeff Sun’s comment on refrigerators reminded me how my father once told me the first refrigerator in his childhood home was not electric – it was gasoline powered.
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Could your father’s fridge have been natural/LP gas instead of gasoline? Friends had a camp cabin in Michigan when I was a teen, and it had an old Servel brand gas refrigerator that ran off an LP gas bottle. It always amazed me how you could make things cold by lighting a fire.
The last time I bought a can of frozen juice I was amazed at how little shelf space was alloted to the entire category.
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My parents always bought frozen concentrate and when I suggested that they buy orange juice in cartons they explained that with their long flight of stairs it would be ridiculous to carry heavy half gallons up the stairs – “why should we carry water up the stairs when we don’t have to?”
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An excellent point!
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I grew up on frozen juices in the freezer compartment. I was the oldest of six kids and my assignment on many days was to use the mashed potato masher to smash the frozen juice cylinder inside the tupperware container we used as a pitcher. We weren’t organized enough to thaw the orange juice out two hours beforehand!
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The potato masher sounds more elegant than my attempts to hack the thing into hunks when someone neglected to defrost a can. I wish I had thought of it!
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There was never a time when we didn’t have Old South frozen orange juice in the freezer, ready to be made, and usually one running low in the fridge. The Mrs. and I were just talking about the days of Hi-C, Sunny D, Tang, and all manner of orange juices.
A lack of OJ may encumber Beeks in his annual crop report.
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Oooh, Tang! I remember being excited when Tang occasionally appeared at home. I liked it better, possibly because it more closely resembled Orange Crush than Orange Juice.
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As a guy that used to work grocery store retail advertising, let me say that things like Sunny D, etc. etc. are not legally able to be called “juice” because they are NOT juice! They are fruit flavored beverages or “drinks”. In many states, if not the country, only 100% juice is a “juice”. Just like Velveeta is NOT cheese, but a cheese “product”. It cannot be called “cheese”.
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Yes, I remember frozen orange juice! In recent years we switched to the unfrozen kind of orange juice (and I do not know why my food procurement spouse did that) – and I see we just emptied that container today. Fortunately, we have an orange tree here in AZ and tomorrow it will be fresh squeezed OJ for breakfast!
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I hope that greening disease stays far away from your orange trees!
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Well, that’s interesting. We had it occasionally as children, after that, I had never thought of it. I’m not a big orange juice drinker.
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Me either, any more. I guess I was overexposed.
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How interesting! We definitely had a lot of Minute Maid cans in the freezer when I was a kid 🙂 I didn’t know anything about their backstory though. One of those things that’s been around so long you never thought you’d see it disappear all together!
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Yes, I had no idea that Minute Maid was the one that created the whole category until I started researching this.
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We’ve never bought the frozen concentrate, and just recently started buying regular orange juice (“with no sugar added”). Both of my daughters enjoying having it for breakfast.
It sticks in my mind that Minute Maid commercials were featured prominently during Bing Crosby’s television specials that starred Bing and his second family.
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