My wife likes the occasional smoothie for breakfast. Her go-to recipe involves frozen strawberries, cocoa powder, vegan protein powder, and orange juice.
At some point, I realized it made more sense to buy frozen juice from concentrate than a bottle or carton of Tropicana. It didn’t immediately dawn on me, because concentrates are something I associate with my childhood and thus hadn’t really thought about in years, but they’re still around and they’re great. These little cans, ubiquitous since childhood, cost about $3 (Canadian), make a little over a liter of juice, and are so easy to make that I was literally doing it when I was a child. Because they are so compact, you can buy a bunch of them and store them in your freezer fairly indefinitely. I still have a lemonade from last summer that will be good when warm weather returns in a few months. In a world where constant innovation is — for some inexplicable reason — a virtue, a product that was perfected 80 years ago seems passe and irrelevant.
If I may bore you with the financial math, a can of concentrate is worth about $2.50 per liter of juice. A 1.5 liter bottle of juice in the refrigerator aisle costs $4.99, meaning you’re spending $3.32 per liter — a 33% increase. The economics only start to make sense when you buy a whopping 2.5L jug for 6.99, which is still a worse deal at $2.77/L.
I don’t expect everyone to be thinking about these things when they shop. You find the product you like, see the price tag, and try to determine for yourself if that seems like a fair ask. I get it. Juice that’s already been made for you and comes in its own container is a smidge more convenient than juice that relies on you to have resources like…….. a jug, water, and a wooden spoon.
I don’t expect everyone to come to the same conclusion that I did about the virtues of concentrate, but I would think enough people would that this product would prosper, quietly, in the freezer aisle of your local grocery store forever. Not so. I found out this week that by the end of 2026, frozen concentrates will disappear from the shelves of grocery stores across Canada.
Guys, we screwed up.
I’m not saying bottled juice shouldn’t exist, I just think there’s a problem if only bottled juice exists. Without a low-cost alternative, I bet prices will skyrocket, the same way everything at the grocery store seemingly does. People will be buying $3 bottles of Fruité instead of much more expensive juices with actual fruits in them. Except those will probably go up to $4 before long too.
I think there’s something a little warped about the mindset that would rather pay more for a negligible amount of convenience. And I think it speaks to the way we, as a culture, have a way of convincing ourselves we are getting a good deal when we are not. That we are doing the right thing when we’re not. That something is normal when it shouldn’t be.
A generation ago, the idea of paying for the privilege to drink water was unthinkable, and now Nestlé owns half the fresh water resources in the world. We let that happen. We empowered people who could enrich themselves by making that happen.
Broadly, it goes to show that sometimes we are simply not capable, as a group, of acting in our own best interests, which explains why renewable fuels haven’t supplanted fossil-based energy, or why large western democracies keep slouching toward fascism. The end of concentrate juices isn’t the most relevant sign of society’s state, but it goes to show that the evidence is everywhere.
I feel like there’s a dotted line to be drawn from the mindset of people preferring to pay more for bottled juice and people letting generative A.I. gobble up the power grid to make fake Ring videos of dancing raccoons. I’m not smart enough to know what it is, but it all feels connected.
A decade ago, I started seeing headlines that accused my generation of “killing” this product and that social trend. That was the free market in action. Every generation appraises the world around it and tosses things that no longer serve them. But the free market — and customer behavior — is not infallible and can be manipulated. So at some point, the idea that a $7 jug of Tropicana was better than a $3 can of frozen Minute Maid — pretty much the exact same product — took hold, and one won the race. A swath of human beings think they need a robot to write their e-mails. A generation of voters in the United States of America bought into the idea that the brown family next door was responsible for all their imagined woes, and put their country in the situation it’s in now. People want simple solutions to problems they’re not even having.
Your dollar has power and so does your mind, or else a ferocious war would not be waged today in order to get it. Do not give it away easily, and make sure you are getting the most for it and giving it what it deserves. I’m not saying that the disappearance of concentrate heralds the rise of fascism, but I’m also not saying it doesn’t mean that.
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