The Fall of Juice and the Rise of Fresh Fruit
Worries about sugar are reshaping American diets, and the fruit business.
Juice sales have gotten squeezed.
Photographer: BloombergAmericans consumed 5.2 gallons of fruit juice per capita in 2017, according to data released by the U.S. Department of Agriculture over the summer. Not exactly consumed — the USDA doesn’t follow people around watching what they eat and drink, so what it measures is “food availability,” which effectively means foodstuffs that are either consumed or wasted. In any case, this is the lowest fruit juice number since the USDA began tracking its consumption in 1970.
The rise and fall of orange juice is at the heart of this story. Consumption took off in the U.S. in the late 1940s, after USDA scientists figured out how to make frozen orange-juice concentrate that could be reconstituted into a palatable beverage. After that, advances in flash pasteurization brought not-from-concentrate juice that tasted even fresher, even though it usually wasn’t. For decades, OJ was successfully marketed as the healthy, vitamin-rich way to start the day. Then, around the beginning of the new millennium, it got caught up in a turn against sugar that swept through medicine and popular discourse. Blame for rising obesity and heart disease rates shifted from fats and meats to sugars and carbs.