So long, frozen juice from concentrate. The once-popular canned drink leaves shelves this year
CBC
Attention, lemonade stand vendors: You'll have to squeeze the fresh stuff this summer. Minute Maid is discontinuing its line of frozen juices as consumer demand declines and tastes change, and it may have been the only company still selling the concentrated products into the Canadian market.
The brand's frozen canned orange juice, lemonade, Fruitopia fruit punch and Five Alive juice blend will be discontinued by April, a spokesperson for parent company Coca-Cola confirmed to CBC News.
The company is leaving the frozen can category in both Canada and the U.S. "in response to shifting consumer preferences," the spokesperson said, as it focuses on products that "better match" what its customers want.
While it's certainly the biggest, Coca-Cola isn't the only juice maker shifting priorities. The combination of Coca-Cola's withdrawal, less than a year after another major Canadian juice producer did the same, could functionally mean Canadians will be unable to purchase frozen concentrated juice, after decades of availability.
Lassonde, a Canadian company behind juice labels like Oasis, Kiju and Rougemont, told CBC News that it left the category last year after demand for frozen-from-concentrate juice waned.
In addition to its own brands, Lassonde manufactures products for grocers like Sobeys, Metro, Loblaw and Walmart. It also owns and previously produced Old South frozen-from-concentrate orange juice in Canada. Old South, along with the store brands for Canada's largest retailers, were confirmed as unavailable for purchase at multiple retailers.
When both flagship brand names and generic competitors exit the market, "it sends a clear signal that the problem is not branding or pricing, but that the product has very low market demand," said Zhe Zhang, an assistant professor of marketing at Western University's Ivey Business School.
"Even the most basic version of the product is no longer going to be sustainable in the marketplace. It really indicates that the product is approaching the end of its lifecycle."
Frozen juice from concentrate was invented during the Second World War, when food scientists were tasked with improving food and beverage quality for American soldiers.
But it was a Bing Crosby-Minute Maid partnership in the late 1940s that transformed the product into a household staple and a moneymaker.
Fast-forward nearly 80 years, and the consumer's taste for juice — frozen or otherwise — just isn't what it was, according to Emma Balment, the Toronto-based director of market strategy and understanding at Ipsos, a market research firm.
Juice brands are losing what beverage analysts refer to as "share of throat." But the cold and canned are bearing the brunt of that loss. "Out of all of the cups of juice that Canadians are consuming, only about seven per cent is from frozen concentrate," Balment told CBC News, noting that it's the smallest and least profitable juice subcategory.
As other beverage makers get more innovative, frozen juice has largely stayed the same, she added. That's just one of the trends that has weighed on the juice industry in recent years.
Canadians are drinking more tap water now than they did a decade ago; parents are more sensitive to their children's sugar intake; and the functional beverage market — which includes drinks that promise some kind of health benefit (e.g. kombucha or prebiotic soda) — have become increasingly popular, according to Balment.
