One more reason to eat an orange and not drink it....

"The lawsuit cites the packaging of the Pure Premium brand, "an illustration of an orange with a straw stuck into it, which is meant to convey the message that [not-from-concentrate] juice is fresh from the orange. This reinforces the '100 percent Pure and Natural Orange Juice' claim in large prominent type." "

"It is not natural orange juice," according to the complaint. "It is instead a product that is scientifically engineered in laboratories, not nature, which explains its shelf-life of more than two months."

Basically, they use what they call 'Flavor Packs" to re-add taste because the pasteurization process kills the actual flavor of the orange juice. The flavor packets are some chemically created concoction made from some sort of oil that they get from the oranges when they squeeze them. The flavor is created through a chemical process. That's why real freshly squeezed tastes totally different. It's like a perfume scent, in South America, they use different flavor packets. What the person is complaining about is the fact that it's being labeled and marketed as if they take it off the tree and squeeze it right into the container which is totally untrue.

My taste buds are really good so I can definitely tell a difference between real squeezed orange juice and the stuff they pasteurize. By the way, organic does not mean that the orange juice is not heated and that they don't add flavor packets - just may mean they use fewer chemicals around the grove. The one part I found horrifying was that they keep the orange juice in "million-gallon tanks for up to a year". Pasteurization kills all flavors in the orange juice so if they don't re-add something, it pretty much tastes like nothing.

What is upsetting to the person whose suing is that they are making people believe that they literally are just squeezing the oranges into their boxes and you never realize the level of the processing involved. The fact that you could be drinking orange juice that's a year old to me is nasty. Frankly, I'd like to just have Tropicana sell the oranges directly to us at a better deal and let us squeeze our own. It's just one more level of manufacturing that's unneeded.

Lawsuits are filed for many reasons - not just for damages. They are also filed to make sure that people don't make crazy claims like "all natural" to make people think that you're eating something fresh from the grove. Basically, people should have a right to know where their food is coming from and that's what's being argued here. It's a matter of the FDA requiring the packets be added as part of the ingredients label and stopping silly loopholes. I blame the FDA for this as they really need to sit down and define what can be marked as natural and not allowing for correct labels. That's why these lawsuits occur. Granted, I think the current laws won't allow real fresh squeezed orange juice so we're all better off squeezing our own oranges (or if you're in Florida - planting your own tree).

Monica