- [Narrator] Orange juice.
Essential to the breakfast table,
and an iconic vitamin C powerhouse.
- Orange juice is as part of breakfast as the rising sun is.
- But it would take a series of unlikely events
to make it part our everyday lives.
- Nobody thought to put it in a bottle
because orange juice spoils so easily.
- [Narrator] It begins with the demands of a world war.
- We can do this. We've got all you can really need.
- The idea of taking technology that was developed
to build an atomic bomb,
and then turn it around to build rations
for the fighting forces is pretty outlandish.
- [Narrator] What starts as a wartime ration
evolves into a potential gold mine.
- You want to sell frozen concentrated juice.
- Is it possible?
- Spawning a bitter rivalry between two juice types titans.
- Tropicana comes up with not from concentrate.
- The implication is that concentrate is bad,
which is a direct blow against Minute Maid.
- [Narrator] Each with a vision
to bring orange juice to the breakfast table.
- Now people are able to enjoy a cold glass
of orange juice without all that work.
- Tropicana raised the bar on orange juice
- And it took off like a rocket ship.
(dramatic music)
- [Announcer] Truly bottled sunshine.
(dramatic music)
- [Narrator] Breakfast has long been considered
the most important meal of the day,
but up until the mid 1940s,
the classic American breakfast as we now know it
was missing one essential item.
Orange juice.
- There was a time where Americans didn't have
access to oranges.
There wasn't the railroad to connect
the orange producing places,
Florida and California to the rest of the country.
Oranges were super special.
They were like a treat that you would mail people
for the holidays.
- If you wanted to have orange juice,
you really had to have it freshly squeezed.
And the thing is, that wasn't available to everybody,
you know, and it wasn't available all year round.
- Very, very few people drank orange juice.
Part of the issue was that it just didn't transport well.
It's a perishable good,
but if you take the convenient natural wrapping off
of an orange, the juice inside will oxidate
and it will go bad very, very quickly.
- [Narrator] As early as the 1920s,
citrus growers had tried pasteurizing
and canning orange juice,
but the process would kill the flavor,
and it never caught on.
- By the time it reached its destination,
it was mainly just an orange gloop.
Scientists called it cooked.
People said it tasted like turpentine.
It just generally was not a very pleasant beverage to drink.
- [Narrator] But in 1939 with the outbreak of World War II,
that was all about change.
Starting a research lab being run out of Boston,
Massachusetts called the National Research Corporation,
or N.R.C.
- Richard Morris was the founder
of the National Research Corporation.
His background was in technical science.
He actually had a degree in physics from MIT,
and he was sort of the leader
pioneering these new vacuum technologies for the war.
- Richard Morris begins using this vacuum tech
that he loves to do.
Everything from removing impurities from metals
and creating powdered drugs like penicillin,
some pretty important stuff.
And in a kind of crazy twist of fate,
through one of Morris's contacts from back at MIT,
he was tasked with creating a vacuum
of unprecedented strength.
And it was used for a little something called
the Manhattan Project,
and the development of the US first atomic bomb.
- Morris is running his company,
but he, you know, he's a science guy,
and he really needs someone who can handle
the more businessy side of things.
So he hires John Fox.
- Good morning.
- Who is a graduate of Colgate University
and comes from IBM of all places,
But he had a reputation coming from IBM
that he could work a room, right?
He was charismatic, he was ambitious.
So this was the perfect sort of compliment.
- [Narrator] Soon, after Fox joins N.R.C.,
the US government puts out a call for the development
of a new vitamin C supplement for troops fighting overseas.
- So during World War II, obviously troop nutrition
was super important, and as part of it,
they gave them these lemon crystals
as part of their K rations,
and you just would dump it in a glass and add water,
and you can have lemonade.
Vitamin C rich.
The problem is it tasted absolutely horrible.
So most of them just dumped it.
- So the quartermaster makes an offer.
He says, anyone, any company,
that can create a vitamin C supplement
to replace this horribly revolting lemon juice
that can get vitamin C in a tasty way
into the American fighting forces
would be granted a contract worth $725,000.
Them's 1940s money.
You wanna translate that to today's money,
that is $15 million.
- Have you seen this?
- Yes.
- So Fox thinks he can win that government contract.
- We've got all the equipment we need.
- Which we are using for important things,
not to make lemonade.
- The idea of taking high tech vacuum technology,
technology that was developed to build an atomic bomb,
and then turn it around to build rations
for the fighting forces, to create food products,
is pretty outlandish and pretty outside the box.
- Could you just imagine what a contract this size
could do for the company?
- [Narrator] Fox convinces Morris to use the lab's
high powered vacuum technology
to work on creating a new vitamin C drink powder,
which troops could mix with water in the field.
- The way Moore's vacuum technology worked is,
it effectively lowered the boiling point
for any substance you put inside it.
Effectively, they could be heated to lower temperatures
and still evaporate all the moisture within,
which was great for things like, you know, blood, plasma,
or in this case, fruit juice.
- So what Fox and Morris are setting out to do
is to create a none-spoiling, shelf stable,
delicious to drink vitamin C source
for the US fighting force.
But it's way easier said than done.
- Well, we have something.
- They start with grapefruit-
too sour.
They go to tangerines.
Not a lot of flavor, just not palatable though.
- So Fox is getting super antsy,
and he's in a race against the clock.
He wants to get the military this vitamin C supplement
before he gets shut out or before the war actually ends.
- Morris tries to dehydrate one last fruit.
- So one of the reasons they didn't go for orange juice
right away is because oranges had been canned in the past,
and when it came out, it didn't taste good,
but they thought, well, maybe dehydration as opposed
to pasteurization is gonna work better.
- We'll keep at it.
- No. Let's go with this one. That's good enough.
- Fox basically says, look,
the bar is super low compared to what
we have on the market now.
We're not really gunning for a stellar product,
we're gunning for this contract.
So what he gets, the US government is essentially
an orange powdered drink mix.
- [Narrator] Now they just have to hope no one else comes up
with anything better.
In southern Florida, an Italian immigrant is struggling
with his own orange business.
- Anthony Rossi embodies this classic American story.
He moves from Sicily in 1921.
He's 21 years old, and he has got $30 in his pocket.
So Rossi works a number of jobs when he arrives in America.
He's a machinist, he's a cab driver, he's a chauffeur.
He gets into the grocery business
and works on Long Island for 13 years.
And then in the 1940s, he moves down to Florida,
and he decides he's gonna sell luxury gift baskets
that send the best oranges north to luxury hotels
and department stores in New York City.
- Notoriously Rossi has extremely high standards
about everything, about what he ate, what he drank,
and especially what he put into these gift baskets.
- [Narrator] Rossi's standards are so high,
that he discards any oranges
that don't meet his specifications.
- He had an incredible ability to taste differences,
and not everybody can taste subtle differences,
but Mr. Rossi could.
- Rossi uses some of the rejects to make
fresh squeezed juice for himself.
- Oranges are plentiful in Sicily,
and Anthony Rossi grew up eating oranges,
and those oranges that weren't aesthetically beautiful
enough to end up in an Anthony Rossi fruit basket
very often ended up in his juicer.
- [Narrator] While Rossi enjoys the fresh squeezed juice
along with family and friends, it's hurting his profits.
- So remember, if you order a bunch of oranges
and you're not selling all those oranges,
every orange you don't sell, that's a loss.
So Rossi begins to think,
to recoup some of the loss from these wasted oranges,
Maybe I should try selling this juice.
- [Narrator] One day Rossi's determination
will help build an orange juice empire,
producing over two and a half million cartons a day
and generating just under a billion dollars a year.
That empire will be known as Tropicana.
In 1945, after two years of experimentation,
John Fox and Richard Morris win a government contract
for $750,000 to produce 500,000 pounds of orange powder
for the soldiers fighting overseas.
- So John Fox takes this money,
and he invests it into building a factory
in Plymouth, Florida that's right next to orange groves.
So he's in the perfect position to pump fresh orange juice
right into his factory, ready to be dehydrated.
- To create an orange powder,
basically what you have to do is remove the moisture.
So their process involved an initial removal
of some of the moisture,
but then taking that remainder
and then freezing it into a frozen concentrate,
which then they later dehydrated even more.
- [Narrator] The concentrate allows for easier storage
and faster dehydration.
- They're ready to go.
They've got thousands of gallons
of frozen orange juice just waiting to be dehydrated
into powdered vitamin C rations,
and then to be sent to the boys on the front line.
- [Narrator] But within months, production comes to a halt.
(phone ringing)
- Hello, this is John.
- [Commander] Hello John.
Commander, how are you?
- I'm well, how are you?
- [Commander] Very well. I have news.
- So you know that whole atomic bomb thing
that Morris was working on?
We dropped two of those, and the war ended.
- [Commander] The war, the contract, it's over.
- I understand.
- So after all their time and all their energy
and all their work,
the government now no longer wants or needs
this vitamin C supplement.
- [Narrator] Fox and Morris are now sitting
on thousands of gallons of frozen orange juice concentrate
that nobody wants,
and they've put all their resources into its production.
- Morris was ready to throw in the towel at this point.
Essentially, he was ready to move on to other ventures
because he had other things that he was interested in.
- [Narrator] But his partner sees things differently.
- Fox in particular,
was having a real hard time letting go of this production.
What if we sell it?
- Who will buy it? The war is over.
- This was Fox's dream.
He left IBM to start his own company.
Now he starts his own company,
and the very first hurdle knocks them down to the ground.
- I mean, sell it in stores, grocery stores.
- You have to understand it wasn't super easy for them
to just pivot and say,
okay, we'll sell it in the private sector.
It is not an easy feat
to sell a vitamin C supplement in 1945.
- At this point in the forties,
the concept of vitamins was still fairly new.
I think the first like one a day vitamin supplement
didn't come out until 1943,
and people were still sort of wary about this.
So if you were gonna put your money, you know,
onto a product that you were gonna try to sell
to the American people,
a powdered vitamin supplement in the 1940s
wasn't a safe bet.
- It won't sell John.
- It will.
Let me make it better.
- [Narrator] Morris agrees to give the project
a little more time, and together they set out
to make their powdered orange juice appealing enough
for a consumer market.
- You have to remember,
neither one of them really know a thing
about selling beverages to the general public.
- Fox and Morris were really fighting an uphill battle.
The only powdered drink around at that time
that was really popular was Kool-Aid,
which had been around since 1927,
but was primarily targeted at kids.
What they were aiming for was a dehydrated orange juice,
which was gonna be far more nutritious and not as sweet.
- [Narrator] But there is another option.
- What if we could sell to consumers just like this?
- [Narrator] Fox sees is a potential opportunity
to tap into the rise of a booming industry.
Frozen foods.
- Because of World War II,
a lot of the canned foods were rationed,
which meant they weren't readily available.
So that made a lot of families turn to frozen foods,
especially between the years 1945 and 1946.
- You want to sell frozen concentrated juice?
- Look, having a refrigerator with a freezer
immediately after the post-war period,
I mean, that's an aspirational dream for most people.
But what people were filling their freezers
with was frozen fish and vegetables, not juice.
- Is it possible?
- No.
I mean, maybe.
But look, anything is possible.
- [Narrator] 125 miles south, Anthony Rossi
has begun bottling fresh orange juice to sell locally,
but he needs a reliable distribution method.
He gets an idea to prepare his juice delivery
with that of another perishable drink.
- At the time, the milkman was still a thing,
delivering milk door to door daily
because it would go bad so quickly on store shelves.
- What do you say to taking some of these bottles
of orange juice along you milk delivery route?
I guarantee people will love them.
How about I make it worth your while?
Great.
- Rossi actually gets his local milk man
to begin delivering his bottled juice
because, well, it's just like milk.
It also has to be delivered fast,
it has to stay cold, and it has a built-in customer base.
- Sure enough, people love the juice
just as Rossi predicted.
Fresh squeezed orange juice is a truly delicious product,
and it actually brings Rossi great joy
to get such a good product into the hands of the people.
- [Narrator] Now Rossi wants to make selling
orange juice his primary business,
but to do so, he'll need to expand his distribution.
- The problem is that it really has a short shelf life.
If refrigerated, you might have two to three days,
but if not, you have possibly hours
before bacteria kind of go in there
and turn your juice sour.
- [Narrator] Rossi believes he'll make a killing
if he can figure out how to make his orange juice
last longer without sacrificing quality.
But so far that's something no one
has ever been able to do.
By 1946, Fox and Morris have spent months experimenting
with frozen concentrated orange juice.
- What Fox and Morris are really hoping is that
this orange juice concentrate tastes the same
as regular orange juice
once you add a little bit of water to it.
But what they found was that the flavor was a little bit off
and that tartness kind of made it
not taste quite like orange juice.
- [Narrator] When all looks lost,
they make a fortuitous discovery.
- So Fox finds a public patent from the Florida Citrus
Commission with work done by a Louis McDowell
who had figured out that if you pasteurize
and freeze an orange juice concentrate,
if you add a little bit of freshly squeezed OJ to it,
it actually makes it taste like it's freshly squeezed.
- [Narrator] Known as cutback,
the amount of fresh orange juice added juice is small
enough to not be harmful
without pasteurization pasteurization.
- So Fox tries this process himself
and he realizes it tastes pretty damn good.
And this could be a product he could sell
to the American public.
- [Narrator] What they developed will one day lead
to the launch of an $11 billion global juice juggernaut,
one of the all time greatest names in Food Marketing,
Minute Maid, the first ever orange juice available
throughout America.
But what they don't anticipate is how hard it will be
to convince consumers that the juice is worth the squeeze.
- It all just seems so complicated.
- [Narrator] In April of 1946, just eight months
after their government contract is canceled,
John Fox and Richard Morris launch their new product,
a frozen concentrated orange juice packed in cans
and sold for 29 cents a piece.
they call it Minute Maid.
- So the name Minute Maid has sort of two origins.
One, it's inspired by the Minute Men of Boston
which is where the National Research Corporation was based.
The other is they thought that Minute Maid
was a good name to really express
how easy it was to make their orange juice,
less than a minute.
- Their name Minute Maid is just a really great branding
that they bring to it
and it finalizes this perfect product
that they're gonna now be able to sell to consumers.
- [Narrator] Minute Maid's frozen concentrated
orange juice is the very first product of its kind.
- I have very fond memories of me and my Aunt Anne
opening that little magic cylinder
of concentrated juice love
and mashing at it with a wooden spoon while we broke it up.
- I would make it myself.
It was also fun too,
because even if you're a little kid, you can just, you know,
take that frozen cylinder of that orange juice concentrate,
squeeze it into a pitcher, add the water,
and just stir it till it dissolves.
- [Narrator] Despite its catchy name,
convenience, and affordability,
the initial launch of Minute Maid doesn't go as well
as planned.
- The records show that they lost roughly $450,000
in the first two years of existence.
- This is of course a huge letdown for John Fox,
but he's more than disappointed.
He's flabbergasted.
Why isn't this taking off?
- After months of disappointing sales,
Fox organizes focus groups with their target customers,
American housewives.
- The concept of taking a frozen can of juice concentrate
and turning it into a pitcher full of fresh juice,
was very foreign to a lot of the American public.
And they weren't quite sure how
they were gonna get people to latch onto this idea.
(dramatic music)
- It all just seems so complicated.
- If Minute Maid wasn't kept frozen,
the juice inside could actually ferment,
expand and the cans could actually explode.
So there are actually stories about people
who were taking these cans home from the grocery store,
not realizing that they needed to be put in the freezer,
and really destroying and making a mess of their cupboards.
That's how new this whole concept and this product was.
- It's not complicated at all. May I?
Just open the can, plop it into the pitcher,
add a little bit of water
and a few quick stirs of the spoon.
And voila. Orange juice.
- See, you just have to show people how easy it is.
- Are you're going to go door to door across America
showing every housewife how to use it?
- [Narrator] Realizing their product urgently needs
an image upgrade, John Fox takes a big swing.
- He decides he needs someone to be the face of the brand
and he needs that person to already be a big star.
So he goes to the most famous person
in the country at the time.
Bing Crosby.
- Raspberries, gooseberries, huckleberries, I'll be there.
- In 1948 Bing Crosby was the number one box office draw
going on five consecutive years.
- Bing Crosby was a huge film star,
a huge public figure in the late 1940s, early 1950s,
they had a weekday radio program that millions
of Americans tuned into.
Bing Crosby was the influencer of the era.
- The idea of celebrity endorsements
really begins with the advent of radio.
And General Mills really pioneers this in 1926
in advertising their product Wheaties,
which produces a huge uptick in sales for them.
But in the 1940s, this is a trusted form of advertising.
The problem is Minute Maid doesn't have the budget
to recruit a high powered celebrity spokesperson.
- John Fox somehow manages to secure
a pitch meeting with Crosby,
but Minute Maid doesn't have a ton of money
at this point in time.
- [Narrator] To secure the endorsement
of the biggest star in America,
Fox proposes a revolutionary deal.
- They come up with a compensation plan
to pay him in stock options.
- So to John's credit, they offer Bing Crosby 20,000 shares
of Minute Maid at 10 cents each,
and he actually goes for it.
- [Narrator] In 1949, each weekday morning, 10:00 AM,
Bing Crosby goes on his massively popular CBS radio show
and advises the American housewife
to buy Minute Maid orange juice.
♪ Orange juice that's fresh and fine ♪
♪ Minute Maid
- [Narrator] He also soon begins appearing
in TV commercials.
- So the makers of Minute Maid blend juicy kinds
together for a very special taste.
To me, it's the perfect taste.
- He just extolled the virtues of Minute Maid.
He appeared in television ads.
A lot of them featured his family at breakfast.
And so this sort of started this idea
that the wholesome American, even Bing Crosby family,
starts their day with the glass of orange juice.
- People wanted to be that quintessential American family.
And Minute Maid definitely played into that
in their advertisement.
They had mom there to give kids a glass of orange juice
while they were on their way to school,
and that imagery just became a part of the American dream
and the American breakfast.
- In 1948, Minute Maid has something like
$3 million in sales.
After three years of Bing Crosby
constantly advertising their product.
1951, their sales were at $30 million a year.
- [Narrator] The ad campaign also coincides
with a marketing push from industry giant general foods,
that shapes the way Americans eat.
- General Foods has a surplus of grape nuts
and they need to move that surplus.
And so they have this brilliant marketing campaign
that promotes breakfast
as the most important meal of the day.
- Marketers are calling this program,
"Eat a good breakfast, do a better job."
So Minute Maid comes along at a time
when the message is being hammered to Americans,
day by day, hour by hour.
So Minute Maid couldn't have been
more fortunate with their timing.
- [Narrator] Americans are now drinking
orange juice coast to coast,
and Minute Maid's frozen concentrate
is the national standard.
The but one man believes it shouldn't be.
Anthony Rossi is determined to redefine
what Americans now know as orange juice.
Anthony Rossi has been selling his orange juice locally,
but with the national success
of Minute Maid's frozen concentrated juice,
he sees the potential profits
to be made selling a fresher tasting product.
- Remember making fresh squeezed orange juice
that lasts more than a few days
is a problem that no one's been able to solve.
- So what Mr. Rossi did is he looked at the data
from the scientists at the Citrus Research Center
and they said, you have to heat the juice
to this temperature for that long to kill this enzyme.
So he said, okay, I have to do that,
but how I do that is my way.
- [Narrator] Rossi experiments with heating
freshly squeezed juice at various times
to reach 165 degrees Fahrenheit.
- He realized that the orange juice tasted different
if you heat it for a really long time,
versus heating it quickly and cooling it quickly.
- [Narrator] After weeks of trial and error,
Rossi makes a breakthrough.
- And so what he did is he took the temperature up very hot
for a very short period of time, and then down again,
and it gave him a better tasting juice.
- [Narrator] Ross's technique will come to be known
as flash pasteurization.
It'll revolutionize the juices industry.
- With the advent of flash pasteurization,
orange juice now can stay refrigerated
for up to three months without losing any of its flavor.
- And this process is still used today for milk,
kegged beer, fruit juices, sports drinks.
- What Rossi was able to do with flash pasteurization
was make an orange juice that tasted pretty close
to freshly squeezed.
- [Narrator] Rossi is finally armed with
a fresh tasting juice that can be shipped far and wide.
He pours every last penny into launching it,
but first he needs a name.
- There's a lot of people who have different stories,
but the story that is most believable
told by the executives
that were closest to Mr. Rossi during this formative time
was that he was on his way to Miami
and he saw a club named Tropicana
and then that triggered the name.
- He's playing off the word tropical,
and just calls it Tropicana.
- [Narrator] Rossi can't afford a spokesman
to compete with Bing Crosby's level of fame.
So instead, instead he seeks a mascot for his drink.
- So Anthony Rossi decides to take his tropical theme
a step further to come up with a character
named Tropic Anna.
And with his marketing team, they developed this character
who was essentially a girl with a hula skirt on,
and balancing a bowl of oranges on her head.
And unlike Minute Maid that are shipping
their frozen juice in cans,
Rossi stays true to shipping in clear glass bottles.
He knows that it's going to give his customers
some of which have never even seen orange juice,
a good look at what they're buying.
- [Narrator] To ensure his products can be shipped
long distances without spoiling,
Rossi invests $1 million in a fleet of refrigerated trucks.
- So orange juice to increase its shelf life
and maximize its potential,
you wanted to keep it refrigerated.
So, to take advantage of the growing highway network
at this time, he was one of the first business men
to really invest in refrigerated trucks.
- In 1954, Tropicana orange juice hits grocery stores
across the Northeastern United States.
- Frozen concentrate orange juice was one thing,
but now people were able to enjoy a cold glass
of orange juice without all that work.
Can you imagine how people felt about that?
I mean, like their minds were blown.
- [Narrator] While Minute Maid is still the most
trusted brand in orange juice,
Tropicana is beginning to build a loyal following.
- Fox and Morris had some of the best scientific minds
working on this frozen concentrated formula,
and it was still a massive production.
It never occurred to them that someone
would just come along and do a better job.
- [Narrator] And to make matters worse, in 1959,
Morris makes a life-changing life decision.
- Morse gets an offer from the US Army
to take on the prestigious role
of director of research and development.
It's not an offer he can refuse.
Eventually he would rise to the rank
of Assistant Secretary of the Army.
- [Narrator] With his partner out of the picture,
the future of Minute Maid rests
squarely on the shoulders of John Fox.
- But no one could have called his next move.
- [Narrator] by 1960 orange juice consumption
is at an all time high in America,
more than doubling in a 10 year period.
- In 1950, the average person consumes
about eight pounds of orange juice a year.
By 1960, that number increases to 20 pounds
for the average person a year,
and 16 of those 20 pounds would've been
frozen concentrated juice.
- [Narrator] Minute Made is the industry leader
by a wide margin,
and with their success comes interest
from another beverage giant.
- How are you?
- I'm well, and you?
- Thank you.
- Have a seat.
You know, growth is always limited by size.
You wanna sell more orange juice?
It's nice to have the world's largest beverage
distribution network behind you.
- Coca-Cola definitely has that going for it.
- John Fox went through a lot
to make Minute Maid what it was,
so maybe a year or two earlier,
he wouldn't have been ready to make that move.
But it felt like the timing was right for Coca-Cola
to take his brand to new heights.
Fox agrees to sell Minute Maid
for a stock swap in Coca-Cola.
No one knows the exact amount,
but you know that payout had to be a big one.
Fox ended up being a multimillionaire.
He would go on to be the president and chairman
of the United Fruit Company.
And just like that, Coca-Cola has entered the game.
- Very good.
- [Narrator] While J Paul Austin has just purchased
the number one orange juice brand in the country,
He has no idea just how big a threat
is looming on the horizon.
- Tropicana's presence in the Northeast is so strong,
that Rossi actually commissions an 8,000 ton ship
to move their product from Florida to New York
that he christens the SS Tropicana.
It shows just how big of a dreamer Anthony Rossi was.
- [Narrator] In 1969 with annual revenues $68 million,
Tropicana goes public.
The infusion of cash from the stock offering
makes revenues explode.
- By the early 1970s,
Tropicana's revenue has increased to 121 million.
That's four times what the revenue was just 10 years ago,
- [Narrator] And it's finally getting the attention
of Minute Maid's new owners.
- Up until this point, Coca-Cola was not really worried
about Tropicana's effect on Minute Maid sales.
- But it's not just Tropicana sales
that has Coca-Cola concerned.
It's also their latest innovation.
- So the orange juice industry takes a cue
from the milk industry in the 1970s.
Milk producers made a major shift.
They switched from packaging milk in heavy glass bottles
to using these wax paper rectangular boxes
of the sort that we see today.
It's a big deal for orange juice,
because it makes more packages be able to be on the shelf
and it is cheaper and easier to transport.
- This is it.
- And that caught Minute Maid's attention
because now Tropicana was actually gaining share.
- Tropicana was creeping up on them.
- This is good, this is too good.
If we can't make it taste like theirs,
can we at least make it look like theirs?
- Previously Minute Maid and Tropicana
sort of had their own sections of the grocery store
with Minute Maid being in the freezer section
and Tropicana being in the fresh section, but not anymore.
- [Narrator] In 1973 to to compete with Tropicana,
Minute Maid starts making an already constituted version
of their juice sold in cartons.
- And honestly, the carton makes you feel
almost like it's freshly squeezed, right?
Because you don't have to add anything to it.
- So Minute Maid now has a product
that's cheaper to produce,
but they convince the public that it's the same
as Tropicana's freshly pasteurized juice.
- [Narrator] Not only are they now packaging their juice
to look like Tropicana's,
they make bold claims that it tastes better.
For Tropicana, making claims about their quality
is a declaration of war.
And Anthony Rossi intends to make sure
his company is ready for battle.
By the late seventies Minute Maid,
now owned by beverage giant Coca-Cola,
is fighting to stay ahead of Tropicana
by offering reconstituted chilled juice
and even claiming to be superior in taste.
- Minute Maid relied on their frozen concentrate technique
to be able to make up for the variations of taste
of the different oranges throughout the growing year.
So it would result in a much more consistent product,
one that they felt was of higher quality.
- [Narrator] Despite Tropicana's success,
Rossi knows they won't be able to fight back
against the deep pockets of Coca-Cola.
- They was such a massive company with so many
advertising dollars at their disposal.
- [Narrator] So the timing is right when another food giant
approaches Rossi about buying Tropicana.
- Beatrice was a Chicago based food conglomerate
and they owned things like Dannon yogurt,
and Country Line cheese, and they were making
major expansions at this point in time.
- Beatrice came in and offered him $490 million.
So he said, okay.
- [Narrator] Anthony Rossi retires at the age of 78.
devoting his wealth and the remainder of his life
to philanthropy.
- Anthony Rossi had a vision of excellence
and the determination to make it happen
no matter what the cost.
- [Narrator] Now without its founder,
it's up to Tropicana's new CEO Spencer Volke
to guide the company through it's bitter battle
with Minute Maid.
- Volke has a background in consumer marketing.
He was a brand manager at Proctor and Gamble
and then 14 years of Pepsi-Cola,
and he was brought in to deal with the threat
that Minute Maid was posing to Tropicana at this point.
Right away, Volke returned to Tropicana's roots,
focusing on what Rossi was inspired by in the first place,
which was freshly squeezed orange juice.
- [Narrator] Volke wants Tropicana to taste so fresh
that the difference between it
and Minute Maid is undeniable.
- What if we kept all the orange bits?
- The pulp?
You want to keep the pulp?
- So if you're gonna be like fresh squeezed,
you want to have pulp in there.
- The pulp or the the little juice sacks
and all that other stuff that that you get
when you squeeze juice had to be removed
before this flash pasteurization process,
because if they didn't, these little sacks would burst,
and again, potentially release enzymes,
which would destroy the flavor.
- [Narrator] Tropicana scientists realize
they can preserve pulp before heating,
and add it back before packaging.
- The trick was to separate the pulp out of the juice.
So we set up a system of capturing
the small intct cells. That worked.
- [Narrator] But their new findings,
Tropicana is poised to crack the industry wide open.
- Tropicana introduced "Homestyle" in 1985.
- [Announcer] Introducing new
Tropicana Homestyle orange juice.
- And it took off like a rocket ship.
- They offer orange juice with varying levels of pulp
so that everybody can decide which level of pulp
is just right for them.
- So what happened was that dad liked the heavy pulp,
and the kids didn't like the hair in the juice.
So what did Mom do? She bought two bottles.
- [Narrator] With all the success of Home Style,
Tropicana is primed to topple Minute Maid
with a new marketing campaign.
- They come up with what is still one
of the most iconic marketing phrases of all time.
Not from concentrate.
They don't even have to say it,
but the implication is that concentrate is bad,
which is a direct blow against Minute Maid.
- [Narrator] In 1990, the first time in history,
Tropicana passed Minute Maid in the orange juice market,
claiming a 22.3% share of the $3 billion marketplace
over Minute Maid's 22.2%,
making Tropicana the victor of the orange juice wars.
Today, the orange juice market in the US alone brings
in over $10 billion a year,
with Americans drinking over 530,000 metric tons.
- We take for granted the fact
that orange juice is just part of a staple,
healthy breakfast.
But how that stable came about really is a story
of how military technology actually makes its way
to our kitchen table.
- Orange juice is as part of breakfast as the rising sun is.
- [Narrator] To this day,
Tropicana is still the number one orange juice
in the country,
with annual worldwide sales of nearly $900 million.
- It's not an exaggeration to say that Tropicana
raised the bar on orange juice.
- [Narrator] While they never reclaimed
their spot at the top,
Minute Maid brings in nearly $200 million
in annual orange juice sales
under the name Minute Maid,
and another $700 million through their subsidiary,
Simply Orange.
Across Minute Maid's various juice products,
the biggest fruit juice producer in the world.
- Tropicana may be number one,
but we have Minute Maid to thank
for bringing orange juice to the masses.
Without them breakfast wouldn't be the same.
And that's the true Minute Maid legacy.