My reasoning is it should be more costly as they are doing extra work juicing it
It’s not scale Walmart can but fruit at scale and sell cheap
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1. Whole fruit is more difficult to store and transport since it has a much shorter shelf life and the appearance affects sales.
2. Fruit juice is very rarely 100% juice. Most of the time, you are buying a mixture of juice, water, and artificial flavors.
The juice isn’t made from the perfect looking fruit. After picking, the fruit get cleaned and sorted. The good looking stuff goes to be sold in the markets. The bad looking stuff goes to the press to get turned into juice.
It’s because most 100% juice is primarily apple juice which is cheaper than any other fruit juice, apparently. It’s always the first juice listed and then the juice you actually want will be further down.
The fruit you are buying in a supermarket is only a part of all the fruit that comes from the orchard.
Basically, you get the fruit that looks good, isn’t bruised, generally has minimal defects.
There is tons of fruit that comes from the orchards that doesn’t fit that. It’s got various defects that make it not ideal for sale. It’s still edible, but it’s not going to get picked up at a supermarket. People don’t buy off-color, deformed, or bruised fruit when any other fruit is present.
So what happens to that fruit? It becomes juice.
Juice can be extracted and stored easier than fresh fruit. It can be transported easier since it doesn’t need to worry about being crushed, over ripe, etc.
Overall it’s just way easier to work with.
An amazingly small portion of the price you pay for groceries is made up of the ingredients. It’s mostly made up of processing costs, transportation costs, marketing and advertising costs, various “running a business” costs like electricity, insurance, corporate aircraft to take the extremely generously paid assembly line workers on vacations around the world, stuff like that.
Fresh fruit is hard to transport. It bruises, it has a short shelf life as it ripens, and on and on and on. Lots of stuff can go wrong with it.
Juice can be poured into a refrigerated tank car and shipped with much less spoilage and cost. It gets even cheaper if you concentrate it near the production point and then reconstitute it at (or at least closer to) the point of sale. It takes some effort and equipment to concentrate it, but you reconstitute it by adding water and stirring. But water is cheap where it is, and expensive to ship, so in the end it costs less to do it that way than to ship juice.
The juice is made from the fruits that didn’t have to be distributed all the way to the store and then marked up by the grocer. Plus second-rate fruit was used to make the juice.
Put more simply, the fruits used to make the juice were **much less expensive** than the fruits you find for sale at the grocery.
The fruit you buy fresh is carefully and expensively selected for quality and desirability. This greatly inflates the cost. The juice you buy is made from fruit which otherwise will have never sold, and so the fruit itself is sold at a steep discount.
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