Ever wondered how it’s possible to get freshly squeezed orange juice all year round despite the seasonality of orange growing conditions? It’s because the entire process of producing the orange juice is a lot less natural than you would first think writes Duane Stanford:

• Coke – the company behind “Simply Orange Juice” – uses satellites to monitor orange groves to determine the ideal time to pick them.
• The squeezed juice is then kept in giant solos, chilled to about 0 degrees C for up to eight months. In season juice is mixed with out-of-season juice.
• When the juice is ready to be packaged it is sent through a 1.9 kilometer underground pipeline to Coke’s bottling plant.
• Then an algorithm is used to determine the recipe of the orange juice that is bottled.
• This algorithm was designed by the same person who designed Delta’s flight scheduling system. It analyzes up to 1 quintillion variables to determine the optimal orange juice blend.
• This algorithm changes daily as the weather and other conditions change to get the right mix of acidity, sweetness, and other attributes through adjustments to the ratio of ingredients and the addition of natural flavors and fragrances.

Read more about the orange juice production process over here.

Source: Business Week

Via: Kottke