
Coke Engineers Its Orange Juice—With an Algorithm - duck
http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2013-01-31/coke-engineers-its-orange-juice-with-an-algorithm#r=rss
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mistercow
>Natural flavors and fragrances captured during squeezing are added back into
the juice to restore flavor lost in processing.

A tiny mention at the end, but this is 90% of the show. Try this: buy a half
gallon of from-concentrate orange juice and a bottle of orange extract. Put a
tablespoon or so of the orange extract into the half gallon of orange juice,
and shake it up. Now taste it, and tell me that "not from concentrate" has
much to do with anything.

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riffraff
I wonder, doesn't everyone of the big corp's do this?

E.g. I remember an episode of some show like "how it's made" showing some big
producer of pasta, where they have all this machinery to check and balance out
the different qualities of incoming wheats (gluten content, minerals etc).

And I assume changes in wheat are not as noticeable as those between half-ripe
and half-rotten oranges.

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harshpotatoes
Without further details from Coke, I believe you are absolutely correct.
Oranges do not have constant flavor throughout the year, and the various
species of oranges which mature at different points in the season have quite
different flavors. For example, in Florida, Valencia oranges rippen after
decemeber for a few months, and are probably the most delicious orange you
will eat. This supply of oranges is not enough to last the whole year, so most
of these oranges are squeezed, pasteurized and stored for later use. The rest
of the year, you might squeeze naval orange (kinda shitty orange), early-mids,
or other oranges. Even worse, oranges have varying flavor throughout the
season. When Valencias first come into season, most are half ripe, or half
green. Maybe only for a few weeks out of the year will you get that perfect
tasting orange. And god help you if those oranges are oragnic, and half of
them are covered in mold.

Rather than sell you an orange juice with varying flavor throughout the year,
or even throughout the season, it is much less wasteful and much higher yield
to blend the oranges together to produce some rather fine tasting juice. All
of the companies receive these blends (and essentially the same blends), the
only difference between the companies is in what they do with these blends.
Some choose to produce a less bitter juice, or sweeter, or more pulp. etc.

Anyways, it's not clear how their algorithm is different from this
advertisement.

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curiousDog
Damn that's a lot of knowledge on Oranges :-)

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fr0sty
There was a book written a while back about orange juice production called
"Squeezed: What You Don't Know About Orange Juice"[1]. The author did the
talk-show circuit back then and you can find some articles and interviews here
and there.

[1][http://www.amazon.com/Squeezed-About-Orange-Agrarian-
Studies...](http://www.amazon.com/Squeezed-About-Orange-Agrarian-
Studies/dp/0300164556)

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scovetta
I'm officially calling bullshit on the algorithm requiring "one quintillion
variables".

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unwind
I was skeptical too, but all it takes is 60 bits, i.e. 60 "yes/no"-questions
in their "black book". Doesn't sound too far-fetched. But, of course, I do
hope they're not brute-forcing it.

See
[http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=log2%28one+quintillion%...](http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=log2%28one+quintillion%29).

~~~
kd5bjo
That's only 60 _variables_ , which can produce a quintillion _variations_.

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davidw
I wish someone would sell Sicilian red orange juice in the US. That stuff is
infinitely better than the bland crap you guys have over there.

I guess for starters you'd need Sicilian red oranges in the US.

[https://www.google.com/search?q=spremuta+di+arance+rosse&...](https://www.google.com/search?q=spremuta+di+arance+rosse&hl=en&tbo=u&tbm=isch&source=univ&sa=X&ei=PncSUfP6IsiTtQbKmoHIDg&ved=0CDwQsAQ&biw=1920&bih=944)

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SeanLuke
Blood oranges are indeed great, and no doubt fresh squeezed blood oranges are
wonderful.

But I have (and still occasionally) live in Italy and have been very
frustrated and annoyed with Italian OJ. I have to vehemently disagree with the
notion that any kind of Italian OJ, at least as sold in grocery stores in
Italy, is even _remotely_ as good as the US kind. Italian OJ is high-
temperature pasteurized, depulpified, put into tetrapak cartons, and radiated.
It tastes like a mixture of the orange juice you get in plastic bottles in US
vending machines, plus Tang. The blood orange version strongly brings to mind
Minute Maid Fruit Punch. And it's expensive!

The US OJ industry makes stuff which is far from fresh-squeezed, but it is
absolutely _light years_ ahead of European variations in taste, and I think
the reason is simple: Americans drink a ton of it. It is one of the very few
foods in the US which Europe simply cannot approach.

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davidw
You're drinking the wrong stuff, is all I can say. You've got to get the ones
from the refrigerated section, not that crap that is sold at room temperature
- that's no good.

And if you don't want it out of a box of any kind, you can get it fresh
squeezed from many places. Nothing beats that.

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SeanLuke
> You're drinking the wrong stuff, is all I can say. You've got to get the
> ones from the refrigerated section, not that crap that is sold at room
> temperature - that's no good.

Trust me. I've been there many times.

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jessaustin
This is an interesting description even if it probably isn't completely true.
It's amusing that anyone would be disappointed to learn this. Orange juice is
sugar water. I don't think anyone gets worked up about how Mountain Dew is
produced.

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brianbreslin
This is fascinating, I always thought I was a not-from-concentrate snob, now I
know I've just been slightly misled all these years. OJ is pure sugar anyway,
not something we should be drinking tons of.

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ErikAugust
I think Nassim Taleb called the idea of OJ being thought of as very healthy as
a trick played on poor people.

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bsimpson
This is why I buy Evolution. I didn't know the reason until now, but their
juice actually tastes fresh squeezed, unlike this crap.

