AHEAD OF THE HEARD -- Most consumers in Canada expect to see oranges in their grocery stores every day, but it wasn't always so. Sixty years ago they were a seasonal fruit available only from late fall to early spring and were a featured special treat at Christmas-time.
Oranges originated in southern China 4,000 years ago, the original being the Mandarin orange which is still sold today. All other oranges are derived from that orange either through selection or hybridization – the common navel orange from California, for example, is a hybrid variety.
As one might expect there are hundreds of orange varieties being grown in the temperate climates of the world, including some of very different sizes and colours. Oranges were either tart, bitter, or sour for most of their existence, and had to be eaten with a sweetener. True marmalade is still made with special Seville oranges, a tart variety.
Oranges were also grown for their blossoms which were used in perfume production. It wasn't until the early 1800s that sweet orange varieties were developed, the most famous being the Valencia variety – it formed the basis of the fresh orange industry. Oranges have a limited storage life and must be picked when ripe, unlike bananas, apples and other fruits that can be picked and stored for months at a time before being marketed.
Oranges are now available year around because they grow and ripen in different parts of the world at various times of the year. In winter, oranges come from California, Arizona, Florida, Spain and Israel. The rest of the year they come from Brazil, South Africa, Chile and Peru. Varieties of oranges maturing at different times also help stretch out the harvest season in each area.
Besides seeing fresh oranges in the produce section of stores, oranges are most commonly seen as juice in bottles and cartons, and as frozen concentrate in cans. It's all part of the long history of orange juice marketing schemes that continue to this day.
During the early 1950s, the constrictions of the seasonal nature of orange marketing led Florida orange growers and marketers to develop the frozen orange concentrate process, allowing them to process and store orange juice and sell it year around. Clever marketing agencies promoted orange juice as a breakfast drink and sold it in the same size and style as cartons of milk – they even got retailers to locate those containers in the milk section. Sales exploded.
As the industry boomed, growers planted millions of new acres of special juice-variety oranges, mostly in Florida, but there were challenges. One issue was to do with taste – the gold standard was "freshly squeezed" orange juice and neither canned juice nor frozen concentrate was considered comparable. It took years but the processing industry eventually developed a new method to pasteurize and preserve orange juice in vast storage tanks at harvest time.
The juice is then sent out on a continuous basis by tanker semi-trucks to bottling plants across the continent, a procedure made easy today by the fact that the orange juice processing industry is dominated by two giants – Coca Cola and Pepsi Cola. To enhance the taste, when orange juice is processed and bottled, pulp and orange oil may be added to mimic the much desired "freshly squeezed" flavour.
Vast promotion campaigns and subsequent litigation and regulation has surrounded the use of the term "freshly squeezed." The controversy swirled around what point in the process to which the term refers. Most juice is freshly squeezed at harvest in industrial plants and stored for many months, yet when naive consumers see the term printed on a juice carton, they assumed that the juice was squeezed much more recently. To resolve this, the term "freshly squeezed" is generally no longer used.
The source of oranges has also changed – fresh oranges from this continent now come almost exclusively from California and Arizona. Florida grows mainly special juice oranges but that is changing, too. Orange tree diseases and pests have been devastating the crop, and high labour costs as well as orange groves being sold for housing developments are also decimating the industry. Forty years ago some of the big orange marketers and processors encouraged the development of orange groves in Brazil, which has a more favourable climate, vast available land and unlimited cheap labour. Huge processing plants were built and small ocean-going tankers are now used to move Brazilian orange juice around the world. Unless you see the special "Florida-grown" logo on a juice container it probably came from Brazil.