Even when we buy orange juice that lists only “orange juice” as its ingredients, store bought OJ looks and tastes really different from OJ when I run a couple of oranges through the juicer. Store bought is more opaque and tends to just taste different from biting into an orange. Why?
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I used to work at Lucerne foods juice factory, we made Safeway juice products and also co-packed for Minute-Maid and Sunripe. I can tell you the exact method we used to make Orange juice.
Every one of our “batches” would start with 4000L of water.
For every batch of orange juice we put in around 700 kg of frozen concentrate. The concentrate doesn’t actually have any additives it just gets put through an evaporator however this heating process breaks down some of the natural vitamins. This process affects the flavour slightly and is probably the core reason why your home juiced orange juice tastes different.
Another ingredient is citric acid, this is a naturally occurring acid in many fruits but is added to give orange juice that “bite” that were used to.
The final ingredient is Ascorbic acid, this is vitamin C, and is added due to the natural vitamin C being broken down in the heating process of making the concentrate.
After all these are mixed we take a sample and measure it’s brix and acidity. The Brix is a way to measure the sugar content of a sample and is used to make sure we get the ratio of water to concentrate right which is pretty key to making good juice. Using this number we add water until we get it into our accepted limits, usually adding a few hundred litres of water to get it there. The acidity number is used to add a bit more citric acid to give it the right flavour as well.
Basically making the juice right is like this:
Brix too high, add more water.
Brix too low, add more concentrate.
Acidity too high add more water.
Acidity too low add more citric acid.
Once the batch is perfect it will go through a processor which will heat the juice up high enough to kill almost all bacteria in it but not quite high enough to sterilize it and ruin the flavour again (like the concentrate process does). Because it doesn’t get quite as high is why the juice will last a really long time but not indefinite.
It will then go into the packaging machine where it is able to deposit the right amount of juice into the packaging in a sterile environment and seal the packaging before the package is released down the line to be put into cases.
Before every run and every half an hour a sample will be taken off the line and the juice retested, tasted and the carton seals tested to make sure everything is good. On top of this every half hour a sample will be taken and put into a holding room where it will sit for a month and re-checked to make sure the seals are still good before the product can be sold.
So anyways long story short, it’s the processing of the concentrate that affects the flavour. It counteracted as best as possible but will still never be exactly the same. That said, this processing is necessary to make a product not spoil after a week or two.
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