The Case Of The Watered Down Apple Juice

Boy, you just can't be too careful these days. I'm a regular drinker of apple juice, and actually buy quite a bit of the stuff, though I've never been particularly loyal to any one brand. This past weekend, I made a trip to the warehouse club, and to save a little coin I purchased a case of 10 ounce bottles of Tropicana apple juice. To make a long story short, when I cracked open the first bottle and took a swig, I was shocked at just how watered down it tasted. So much so that it almost didn't taste like apple juice at all. Holding the bottle up to the light, I could even SEE how watered down it was compared to even the generic supermarket brand I usually buy.

Curious to see if it was just my imagination, I did a Google search and came up with, of all things, a couple of insightful customer reviews from Amazon.com:

By Jean Logan
Tropicana has gone the way of others in reducing the real juice in their product and adding flavor enhancers hidden under the words "Natural Flavors" which means the additions of a vegetable extract called glutamic acid. This extract is bad news for your body. This allows them to add more water and less juice. Buy another brand. The apple juice flavor is weak at best.

And here is a snippet from another one:

By K. Rayman
Made from Chinese apple concentrate. Chinese apples are bitter from all the chemical sprays and pesticides used on the trees and soil. China makes the juice marketable by turning the apples into powder concentrate and shipping the powder in industrial drums. Any juice that uses chinese apples is of questionable quality and we all know the chinese record for producing safe products.

The fact that the apples come from China does not surprise me, especially after this story I posted here last September, but the fact that the company would put out such a shockingly substandard product in a brazen attempt to cut costs was a real eye opener. You can bet that this will be the last time I ever purchase a Tropicana juice product of any kind.


Bonus: I guess I was the fool this time