Juice

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For other uses, see Juice (disambiguation).

Orange Juice.

Juice is a fluid naturally contained in animal or plant tissue. This article deals with the latter. For example, orange juice is the liquid extract of the fruit of the orange tree. Juice may be supplied in concentrate form, requiring the user to add water to reconstitute the liquid back to (an approximation of) the original state. Juice will usually have a defined level of purity, in some countries of 100%. It should not be confused with a squash which is usually an artificial juice to be diluted with water. Common methods for preservation and processing of fruit juices incluide evaporation, spray drying and pasteurization.

Almost all fruit contains juice.

In Bulgaria and New Zealand (and possibly other countries), juice denotes a sweetened fruit extract, whereas nectar denotes a pure fruit or vegetable extract - thus the terms being opposite of that of some other countries, like Norway.

Popular juices include apple, orange, tangerine, cranberry, grapefruit, pineapple, tomato, blackcurrant, grape, and pomegranate. It has become increasingly popular to combine a variety of fruits into single juice drinks. One of the most popular examples is Carrot, Orange and Ginger. Prepackaged single fruit juices have lost market share to prepackaged fruit juice combinations. A number of new companies have had considerable success suplying prepackaged fruit juice combinations on the basis of this transition. "Innocent" and "P&J" are UK examples; "Nudi" is an australian example. Over the same period, Juice bars have become comonplace across most of the western world and offer similar juices. Most of these juice bars offer freshly made fruit juices and claim that that confers greater health benifit. The rationalle for this claim is that once the fruit has been juiced, its antioxidents start to react with oxygen free radicals and so lose their health benefit. [1]

Fruit juice consumption overall in Europe, Australia, New Zealand and the USA has increased in recent years [2], probably due to public perception of juices as healthy natural nutrient sources and increased public interest in health issues.