When Chemists Attack

My wife loves orange juice. I drink it less often than I should, but we both agree that orange juice made from concentrate doesn’t taste good. So we make it a point to always buy the not-from-concentrate juice.

We don’t usually shop at Wal-Mart – for many reasons. Our car, however, was so full of baby stuff before our week at the beach that we decided to buy some of our groceries after we’d unloaded all of our stuff at the place we were staying. Since the traffic over the fourth of July holiday was horrible, we went to the most easily accessible place to buy food. That place, unfortunately, turned out to be Wal-Mart

We were in a hurry, and I picked up some orange juice. Here’s the carton.

The brand’s not familiar, but the label states clearly that the juice is not-from-concentrate, so it shouldn’t be too bad.  (More below the fold.)

I was wrong. The juice tasted bad. It had little flavor, but was quite tart. It tasted just like cheap juice made from concentrate would. What was wrong?

Let’s take another look at the carton.

What’s that hiding on the bottom? (where it can’t be easily seen on the refrigerated shelves)

From concentrate! So, this not-from-concentrate juice is actually made from concentrated juice. This makes the statement at the top of the carton just plain deceptive.

The ingredients label of this juice is a work of art, if you’re inclined to read through all the useless words it includes.

If I’m reading this right, the ingredients seem to claim that this is regular old from-concentrate juice. Perhaps the top of the carton refers to the fact that the juice was originally not from concentrate before it was concentrated? Much like frozen foods are perfectly fresh when they are frozen. 🙂

Shame on TWS Marketing Group for their deceptive packaging, and shame on Wal-Mart for carrying the product!

This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 11th, 2007 at 10:36 pm and is filed under Personal chatter. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.