How Orange Juice Is Made

the orange the fruit so popular they named a color after it America glugs through two and a half billion liters of the sweet juice every year and most of it comes from Florida where they harvest and squeeze over 30 billion oranges a year to keep the juice flowing Florida the Sunshine State home of Disneyworld Miami Vice hanging chads and oranges millions upon millions of oranges in fact orange trees outnumber people 3 to 1 in Florida and they produce over 6 million tons of citrus fruit every year and almost all of it ends up as breakfast orange juice to grow oranges what you need is good soil large quantities of blissful Florida sunshine and buckets and buckets of rain they don't like to advertise it but the Sunshine State is also the soggy state parts of Florida are among the wettest places in the US with up to 180 centimeters of rain a year not so good if you came here for a beach holiday but great for farmers like Tom Kirchner this is what adds up to giving us a good environment to grow citrus adequate rainfall to produce large crops with lots of juice in them thanks to the sizzling sunshine and dismal downpour Tom's able to grow 5 different varieties of oranges here they do this because each variety ripens at different times of year which means you can enjoy OJ all year round but how do they know when an orange grove is right for harvesting to guarantee that the juice will be liquid sunshine the sugar to water content is analyzed yielding a measure known as the Brix when it's at least 10% sugar the oranges are ripe for the picking but there's no substitute for the taste test ready to make orange juice the fruit might be tasty but it's not going to make juice if it's left on a tree they need to be picked and with millions of oranges ripening at once they need to be picked fast if you want to get fruity in a hurry you need one of these terrifying contractions or as they like to call it here the Oxbow 30 to 20 this magnificent machine is what's known in the trade as a continuous canopy shaker and this particular machine was designed by Tom Visser it engages the foliage of the tree and shakes it to intro and the shake is violent enough to sever the fruit stem on them then the fruit falls and gets intercepted the Oxbow can harvest an incredible two tons of oranges every minute this performance comes at a price a pair of these mechanical orange pickers will set you back a million dollars just as well Tom's got enough work to keep them busy picking two million boxes of oranges totaling 81 thousand tons of fruit per year once the oranges have been picked the race is on to make sure your breakfast OJ tastes as fresh as can be so the fruit is shipped out in these 400 horsepower transport trucks 20,000 kilos at a time the trucks bring them to an OG a processing plant like this one in Lake Wales Dave crumbly make sure they don't run out of oranges we'll do about 200 of these trucks a day and each each one of these trucks will hold about 120 thousand oranges in 24 hours will be about 24 million pieces of fruit that will run through here so more often than not Dave gets his daily dose of vitamin C to begin with the oranges are washed out of the trucks the fruit is then carried along two kilometres of conveyors into the processing plant where it's graded the oranges are separated by size and it's time to extract the juice but these days you won't find gangs of sad-looking orange squeezes with sore wrists this is orange juice squeezing on an industrial scale this fearsome machine drops each orange into a ring of metal prongs which squeeze out the juice before ejecting the pith and peel from orange to OJ in the blink of an eye of course when it comes to OJ the world is divided into two great opposing camps one likes it smooth the other with bits so a load of the pulp that has been carefully screened is added back into the juice to create the wholesome authentic OJ with all the good stuff still in it the OJ is now ready to be poured into cartons it takes two dozen oranges to make enough juice to fill each 1.89 liter carton but quantity counts for nothing unless the quality is good enough to keep orange juice the world's favorite breakfast tipple there are palates that can tell a Beaujolais from a burgundy in an instant and noses that can with a Chanel number 19 from a hundred paces well these guys do the same for OJ an expert okay taster can spot minor variations in taste composition and acidity there are 11 different measures of quality only when a batch of OJ ticks every box is it fit to be shipped all that effort means this factory alone turns 3 billion oranges into over 250 million litres of juice every year which makes delicious fresh OJ a luxury we can all enjoy you

Channel: Triwood1973

Views: 13,988,389

Rating: 4.5687771 out of 5

Keywords: How, its, made, orange, juice, oj, breakfast, drink, florida, sunshine, state

Id: T8KJGtMGMSY

Length: 6min 40sec (400 seconds)

Published: Tue Nov 24 2009

Reddit Comments

[u/redshirt3]

So this is the fresh stuff only? As most orange juice has all the water removed, stored in vats and then rehydrated with perfume flavoring added when its time to sell or ship abroad (thus juice from concentrate etc) i.e. zombie orange juice. Dont be fooled kids

[u/G0PACKGO]

You mean there's a better way?!?

[u/Planetariophage]

That orange picker is impressive.

[u/G0PACKGO]

All that Juice from Just one bag of oranges??!!

[u/simon_wang12]

Cool

[u/Sploifen]

https://imgur.com/UDlTThA

[u/dhamon]

They didn't show when they add the floor lamp flavor packs.

[u/[deleted]]

how orange juice is made