AILSA CHANG, HOST:
And now we say goodbye to another icon.
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UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR: Ah, and here it comes - the Minute Maid orange juice. This wouldn't be right, to start today without Minute Maid.
JUANA SUMMERS, HOST:
Well, apparently, we'll soon have to. This week, Coca-Cola, which owns Minute Maid, announced it will be discontinuing its line of frozen juice concentrates, including its famous orange juice. This decision is not landing well on social media with users like Shannon King, Rock102 and Evan Yells at Clouds (ph).
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SHANNON KING: This is diabolical, to remove frozen juice from our life.
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON: There you go. Another major corporation ripping your childhood right out of your hands.
EVAN: What do Taylor Swift tickets and frozen orange juice have in common? I wish it were a joke. Instead, it's a story about how monopolies ruin everything.
ARIELLE JOHNSON: It feels like one of those things where frozen orange juice is something that, like, has always existed and should exist forever.
CHANG: That last voice belongs to Arielle Johnson. She's a flavor scientist and the author of the book "Flavorama: A Guide To Unlocking The Art And Science Of Flavor." And she says Minute Maid was a game changer.
JOHNSON: Before frozen concentrated orange juice, you only drank orange juice if you lived near where oranges were being grown.
SUMMERS: And then, she says, during World War II, the U.S. Army offered a lucrative deal to anyone who could crack the code of making nutritious OJ whose flavor wouldn't degrade in the transportation process.
JOHNSON: Frozen concentrated orange juice is, I believe, a pretty direct product of the need to get, you know, drinkable vitamin C to lots of soldiers.
CHANG: In 1945, a group of scientists figured it out, evaporating the liquid from fresh juice at low temperatures then adding a little fresh juice right back in. The next year, Florida Foods began to sell the country's first concentrated frozen orange juice.
JOHNSON: It was this new piece of tech that really democratized orange juice.
SUMMERS: They called it Minute Maid because it was just that easy to make, and it became a hot commodity across the rest of the 20th century. It even factors into the plot of the 1980s comedy "Trading Places."
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RALPH BELLAMY: (As Randolph Duke) We want you to buy as much OJ as you can the instant trading starts.
DON AMECHE: (As Mortimer Duke) Don't worry if the price starts going up. Just keep buying.
CHANG: But recent competition from other products like energy drinks and protein smoothies has caused frozen OJ sales to plummet, and the industry has faced other setbacks.
JOHNSON: There is a disease called citrus greening disease that has led to, like, almost catastrophic reductions of orange harvests in Florida. So the Florida orange industry has been having a hard time for a long time.
SUMMERS: A lot of the American orange supply now comes from Brazil, but they've had some rough growing seasons, too.
CHANG: Coca-Cola said it will continue to sell its in-store inventory, which means there is still time to fill your freezer before Minute Maid is iced out.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC) Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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