How Orange Juice Was Built

Proof

America's Test Kitchen

Society & Culture, Food, Arts

4.4 • 1.8K Ratings

🗓️ 14 January 2021

⏱️ 41 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

When you see “not from concentrate” on a carton of OJ, you might assume it’s healthier than other brands. But actually, that’s a relic of a decades-long juice brand battle and deceptive marketing that sold customers the promise of a "balanced breakfast." In fact, the behemoths behind orange juice popularity have constantly shape-shifted and reinvented themselves in order to bring our favorite breakfast juice to the proverbial table. In this episode of Proof, we chronicle Minute Maid and Tropicana’s decades-long tête-à-tête, that firmly solidified orange juice as a permanent fixture of the American diet. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	Thanks to this season's presenting sponsor, Kohler. They design innovative sinks and
0:04.8	faucets for people who do their best work in the kitchen.
0:11.6	Picture a courtroom.
0:13.0	It's 1961 in Washington, D.C.
0:16.0	and the place is packed with government regulators and orange juice producers.
0:21.0	There were basically a bunch of men holding these hearings.
0:24.0	Alyssa Hamilton wrote a book called Squeezed,
0:28.0	What You Don't Know About Orange Juice.
0:30.0	She spent months pouring over 3,000 pages of transcripts from these hearings.
0:36.0	The idea of the hearings was to establish certain industry standards,
0:40.0	what producers could do to the juice when they were making it and how they were allowed to advertise it.
0:46.0	As they bantered about the ins and outs of juice production,
0:48.9	Alyssa noticed something strange.
0:51.8	The consumer was continually referred to as Mrs Housewife.
0:56.7	Actually, the entire conversation was based on what these gentlemen thought
1:00.8	Mrs Housewife knew or didn't know about her orange juice. In one
1:05.4	particular exchange between an FDA lawyer and a representative from SunKist, they
1:10.9	argue whether Mrs. Housewife knows or cares that package juice is different from fresh squeezed.
1:17.0	The FDA guy asks,
1:20.0	When the Housewife takes from the refrigerator a can of concentrated orange juice
1:25.5	reconstitutes it and puts it on the table, what do you think she tells her family this is?
1:30.8	And the Sun Kiss guy replies,
	...

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