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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All that “100% orange juice, not from concentrate” stuff you’ve been drinking technically is 100% orange juice but not in the way freshly squeezed at home with a juicer is. It’s complicated.
Once the juice is squeezed and stored in gigantic vats, they start removing oxygen because removing oxygen from the juice allows the liquid to keep for up to a YEAR without spoiling. This is good because people don’t start hating orange juice ~~in the fall~~ when it isn’t growing season and then suddenly start craving it again when oranges are actually growing on trees. For the sake of year-round juice, we pasteurize, which is great at keeping orange juice shelf stable, but absolutely devastating to flavor.
So–in order to have OJ actually taste like oranges–the beverage companies hire flavor and fragrance companies to create “flavor packs” to make juice taste like orange juice. The flavor packs vary from company to company which is why you probably have a favorite “brand” of orange juice when logically one squeezed orange should taste like another, but they all contain ethyl butyrate, which our brains associate with “this tastes like orange juice probably should.”
So how do they get away with saying “100% juice”? Those flavor packs are made from oranges and orange byproducts–such as the aforementioned ethyl butyrate–so the FDA doesn’t require that they list these as separate ingredients, so if you pick up a bottle of orange juice and the only ingredient is “oranges,” that’s why. What they’re not telling you is that the product *is* chemically altered.
EDIT: As many have pointed out, I have my orange growing season wrong and have since corrected it.
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