The ingenious marketing campaign that made orange juice a staple part of breakfast
The classic orange juice container has long accompanied tea and coffee on the breakfast table. It’s flashy, but kind of boring, and has the dubious ring of being a good thing for you.
Few of us give it much thought, aside from remembering its much-touted vitamin C content.
But processed orange juice as a daily drink, you may be surprised to learn, is a relatively recent addition.
Its current status as a global phenomenon is the creation of 20th century marketerswho had to deal with a bunch of oranges and nowhere to dump them.
In the early 20th century, oranges from Florida and California were vying for the attention of American buyers. The fruits were shipped everywhere and eaten fresh or juiced at home.
California cultivated the navel orange and the valence; the latter was the best for making juice.
Florida, on the other hand, grew four varieties, and all of them were decent juice oranges. That meant that when, in 1909, growers got together to deal with a growing problem (a glut of oranges for the market), squeeze theminstead of stopping its production, was considered a feasible solution.
Commercially made orange juice was only available in a can. The taste of canned orange juice was nothing like fresh, and the appetite for it reflected that.
Just one teaspoon of canned orange juice was consumed per person in the US in 1930, historian writes alissa hamilton in his book “squeezed”, compared to almost 8.6 kg of oranges per person in the same year.
Be that as it may, oranges, in juice and in other forms, were the subject of a intense advertising campaign in the 1920s, when the discovery of vitamins was an event of the moment.
The vitamin C It was a perfect reason to consume more oranges. Things really took off when nutritional biochemist Elmer McCollum popularized a mysterious ailment that he said was the result of eating too many “acid-producing” foods like bread and milk: acidosis.
In fact, true acidosis, which has a variety of causes, cannot be remedied by eating lettuce and citrus, as stated McCollum. But that didn’t stop the citrus industry’s imagination from playing on this newfound fear. The writer Adee Braun cites in a note in Atlantic a Sunkist advertising brochure:
“Estelle seemed to lack vitality; she didn’t even try to be entertaining; therefore, she did not attract men… ‘Acidosis’ is the word on the mouth of almost every modern doctor”.
“The cure was simple: consume oranges in any form and at every possible opportunityBraun writes. “And Sunkist assured the acidosis-fearing reader that it was impossible to go overboard on oranges.”
The focus soon returned to vitamins. Doctors opposed these ideas, but the willingness to adopt any whim in the service of oranges was there.
The juice was still canned at this point and far from popular. But the government, especially the Florida Department of Citrus, was willing to invest in experimentation.
The US Army’s search in World War II for a form of citrus that soldiers would not surreptitiously discard from their rations led to a research program on palatable orange juice.
Trying to condense orange juice like milk led to memorably bad results. “High temperatures burned off its shine and produced a slimy, brownish mixture that lacked fresh flavor. [sic]Hamilton writes.
But evaporating some of the water under pressure, mixing a portion of fresh juice back into the concentrate, and then freezing it was more successful. The fresh juice rescued the stinky concentrate. Something worth drinking was produced, though still a long way from the fresh undiluted version.
The innovation came as Florida growers were dealing with a massive and cyclical overproduction. However, the promise of a new way of making juice that could be kept frozen and then reconstituted in people’s homes prompted them to produce even more.
They increased tree planting in the 1940s. Oranges were made into frozen concentrate and eventually chilled juice, an industry term for the chilled product. If the juice could be held in stasis, waiting for a consumer’s glass, then the only problem was to increase demand as much as possible.
It didn’t matter that this juice was different from a glass of freshly squeezed truth. When John McPhee checked into a Florida hotel while traveling more than 50 years ago, he discovered that even in the land of oranges, fresh juice was a dim memory.
“Next door was a restaurant, with orange trees, full of fruit, scattered across its parking lot,” he wrote in his book Naranjas.
“Went in for dinner and since I was staying for a while and this was the only restaurant in the neighborhood I checked out the possibility of fresh juice for breakfast. There were never any requests for fresh orange juice, the waitress explained herself, apparently not thinking about the one she had just made.
“Fresh is too sour or too watery or too something,” he said. “Frozen is the same every day. People want to know what they are buying”. He seemed to know his business, and I began to sense what turned out to be the truth: that he should stop ordering fresh orange juice, because few restaurants in Florida serve it.”
Packaged orange juice only gained popularity when companies began adding “flavor packs”, oils and essences that could be added to the old juice to give it the fresh flavor.
While this practice led to lawsuits over whether the resulting product could be considered “natural,” at the time American consumers were used to the taste, convinced of the need for orange juice to accompany a full breakfast, and out of practice juicing. themselves.
The busy lifestyle of the 20th century it also saw a broader shift toward convenience foods that didn’t require much preparation, which may have helped the appeal of packaged juices.
It took a few decades, but with the help of advertising and processing technology, the extra orange landfill became solidly established as its own product, far outselling the oranges themselves.
“On any given day (with oranges and tangerines together), 5% of Americans will consume a fresh orange,” a 2003 USDA report concluded. “21% will consume orange juice.”
Reference-www.lanacion.com.ar