Orange Juice – Florida’s Liquid Gold

I bet most of you have a container of orange juice in your refrigerator. I do. I drink it every morning and add it to margaritas on the weekends. Those of us who grew up in Florida like I did probably take OJ for granted. My wife grew up in Southgate, which was an orange grove before homes were built there. Her home, as did all the homes on her street, had a row of orange trees in the backyard. As kids, we always had numerous mason jars of fresh squeezed OJ in our freezer…we rarely had to buy it! But when we did buy it, Tropicana was one of the only choices. I recently had to be in Bradenton and drove past their huge plant and waited at the railroad tracks for a train carrying tons of oranges. The “juice trains,” as they are now known, used to be white but now are all orange and serve as a powerful form of advertising, running 10 trips each week to Jersey City and Cincinnati. Additional shipments trek 3,000 miles to California in specially-equipped refrigerated cars.

At one point, Tropicana`s machines in the plant processed 700 oranges a minute, automatically extracting all the juice at a rate of up to 1.3 million gallons a day, while oils are removed from the peels and the peels are processed into cattle feed high in protein and carbohydrates.

So here’s little history of OJ! Anthony T. Rossi, was an Italian immigrant who arrived in the U.S. with just $25. Florida orange juice proved to be liquid gold. Rossi founded Tropicana in Bradenton in 1947, delivering fresh-squeezed juice to local residents. In 1954, he found a way to pasteurize the juice and was soon shipping millions of gallons around the country.

By 1970, Tropicana shipped bulk orange juice via insulated boxcars in a weekly round-trip from Florida to Kearny, New Jersey. By the following year, the company ran two 60-car trains a week, each carrying approximately 1 million gallons of juice. That was the year the “Great White Juice Train” (the first unit train in the food industry, consisting of 150 100-ton insulated boxcars) began service over the 1,250-mile route. An additional 100 cars were soon added to the fleet with small mechanical refrigeration units installed to control temperature. Tropicana saved $40 million in fuel costs alone during the first 10 years in operation. Rossi’s immense success in the fresh orange juice market earned him the title: “The Father of Chilled Juice in Florida.” In 1978, Rossi retired and sold Tropicana for nearly $500 million!

Today Tropicana, now a division of PepsiCo, is the world’s largest producer of branded juice. And although citrus greening and changing tastes have reduced consumption in recent years, the average American still drinks more than three gallons of the sweet, sunny-hued beverage a year. Their juice is 100 percent oranges. A 59-ounce container contains juice from 16 fresh oranges and a tiny amount of natural oils from the peel. Juice extractors squeeze 34,000 oranges per minute and the plant processes 48 million oranges and fills 2.5 million containers in one day, for a total of 900 million containers per year. 

The processing plant operates 24 hours, seven days a week, employing employs 900 workers. There are 2,000 to 2,500 workers who pick oranges. About 95% of Florida’s orange crop goes to juice. Sadly, citrus greening disease has dropped Florida orange production from 244 million boxes in 1998 to 70 million this season. Florida produces 49 percent of U.S. oranges, just behind California, where greening hasn’t hit commercial groves.

So enjoy a glass of Liquid Gold OJ…made in America, made in Florida, made right here at Tropicana! Cheers!