Why don't you see pure Strawberry juice anywhere? Marsh a local grocery had fresh...

Factual Questions
1

juice machines (and a display of juices which went with it) about ten years ago. In addition to orange juice they had strawberry juice for about a month one year. It was perhaps the greatest liquid that I’ve ever tasted. Ever since I have been trying to find strawberry juice. Everything that I can find which says strawberry also has other juices (usually white grape) mixed in with a small amount of strawberry juice (and usually added sugar). There is a Mexican brand which features only strawberry juice, BUT they add a great deal of sugar. Several questions arise from this situation:

  1. Is there a reason you can’t find pure strawberry juice? Is it too expensive (although I have seen other very expensive juices).

  2. Does this represent a possible business opportunity for someone or some company? Even if it’s already out there somewhere it is very rare and thus I have to believe that there is a good deal of pent up demand.

2

Is it food day today, Roland?

3

I’d leave the personal attacks out of GQ.

I’ve seen strawberry juice in the local Albertsons…not sure on its purity however. I do know it tates pretty good. Even better are these pure strawberry smoothies made at this Vietnamese restaurant I know, but again I never asked them how much suger they added.

4

Well, it’s not fresh, but I’m fairly sure it’s pure. And expensive. I give you vegen strawberry juice concentrate.

http://www.naturesflavors.com/product_info.php?products_id=3364

5

Maybe Marisa Picard stole it all.

It’s as hard to find, actually, as pure cherry juice—at least it’s hard to find in this part of the country. This site lists strawberry juice concentrate at $39.99 per quart, so maybe there’s something to the idea that it’s a skosh on the expensive side? For comparison, the same site sells apple juice concentrate at $4.99/qt.

Also, this website suggests that strawberries make a rather thick juice and should be diluted with other juices to make it more drinkable. Having never seen the stuff in pure form, I couldn’t say, but perhaps the marketing moguls figure there isn’t much of a market for a juice that drinks like slush.

Googling for “strawberry juice” (in quotes) turns up a metric eyeful of links suggesting how strawberry juice should be mixed with rum, but not where to actually obtain the stuff. All I noticed in a cursory search was a bottler in Thailand (and the Vegan site that I linked first).

It may help your googling if you put -cocktail -rum -bartender -kiwi so you eliminate some of the unhelpful links.

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It comes packaged in neat little containers called “strawberries” and you get it out by squeezing the container. If you plan to do this a lot you can buy a handy machine called a “juicer” which will save wear and tear on your wrists.

What’s the world coming to when people assume that, if you can’t get juice in a carton, you can’t get it at all?

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UDS’s post is incoherent.

Seriously, where can we get this stuff? (in jugs)

8

What’s incoherent about it? Strawberry juice comes from strawberries. Strawberries are readily available, and extracting the juice at home is not difficult. Why the pressing need to buy it in a jug? There’s abundant evidence in this thread that prepackaged strawberry juice is not easily found and, if found, is likely to be mixed with other juices and/or with sugar. If what you want is pure strawberry juice, or a strawberry juice mix with ingredients and proportions of your own choosing, buying and juicing your own strawberries looks to me like much the best solution, and an entirely practical one. Indeed, it’s the obvious solution. What’s the problem?

9

I miss Marsh. Smitty’s, too. Unless there’s more than one Marsh, I have a pretty good idea where you live, Roland Deschain!

10

I recently saw glass bottles of pomegranite juice. Pricey, but very good.

Have you tried asking someone at your grocry store?

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UDS, you aren’t being particularly helpful, which is to say you aren’t being helpful at all.

We don’t really care about getting strawberry juice directly. We care about why it’s difficult to get strawberry juice pre-made, and why it’s so damned expensive when we can find the stuff.

Any monkey knows how to juice a strawberry, and, apparently, so do you. Good job. Just take that commentary someplace else.

Roland, I think it’s most directly related to a lack of demand. Very few people grew up drinking strawberry juice like they grew up with orange juice or apple juice, for example, and so few people would even think of looking for it.

But why is there no demand? Possibly because juice machines (at the industrial scale) don’t like working with pulpy food that reduces to slush. But oranges are pulpy and reduce to slush, and we can effectively make pulp-free orange juice (for heathen bastards ;)).

And this doesn’t tell us why strawberry juice is a common mixture in juice cocktails, or why strawberry wine is so popular, and yet we still have a time finding pure strawberry juice.

Maybe it’s related to how sweet strawberry juice is. Apples and oranges and even grapes probably have a lower sugar content than strawberries, and making a syrupy juice would go against the national palate. Or what the companies think the national palate is, which is the same thing. This sweetness would explain its presence in cocktails, since it would be an easy way to naturally sweeten otherwise tart or ascerbic drinks.

So, the real reason? I’m guessing it’s why we eat (and don’t eat) a lot of things: historical accident ossified by the market economy. We are good at making things we know we want. (Too good, perhaps, to judge from reports on obesity.) We aren’t so good at making things we don’t know we want, because it requires an initial outlay that only a few companies can afford. And if those companies don’t see a good reason to invest in something, it won’t get done on a large enough scale to make it economically worthwhile.

12

There are 72 Marshs across Indiana and Ohio.

13

My thought is that because of all the tiny seeds, it may be very difficult and expensive to filter the juice. I sometimes throw strawberries into my juicer when I’m mixing up some kind of random fruit combination, and the seeds are always floating around and sinking to the bottom, then floating back to the top when you drink out of the glass.

It also takes a LOT of strawberries to make juice. They’re a juicy fruit, but they’re small. I’ve never made straight strawberry juice because I know that for the amount of money I’d spend on a quart or two of strawberries to make juice, I’d probably enjoy eating them whole a lot more, and I’d need less of them to satisfy my strawberry needs.

And regarding the juicer, I have one and I love it but I don’t see it as the solution to the strawberry juice problem. Why should someone buy a $75 juicer plus pints of strawberries for $3-4 each if a juice manufacturer could provide a bottle of it for $2.50?

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Winnie, very good points. I know we, as a technically-advanced market economy, could overcome all of those problems if the market pressed us to (heh), however. I stand by my assessment.

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Ah, but consider the structure of oranges versus strawberries. Put oranges in some kind of press and those little “beads” inside the segments burst, squirting the juice out. Do that with strawberries and I suspect that you will get a far lower ratio of juice to the size of the fruit - they are a much more dense fruit, with extremely tiny bubbles full of juice - or perhaps it’s even contained on a cellular level. (I’m not sure about this aspect of the structure of strawberries.) So not only do oranges seem to have more juice, they would also be expected to have more manageable pulp, when you consider that it’s just the thin membranes of segments and the “beads”, rather than some amorphous mass of squashed strawberry “meat.”

And on the topic of price, oranges are much cheaper than strawberries. One could get a 3 or 5 lb bag of oranges for the same cost as a pound of strawberries. The OP said he’s seen many expensive juices but gives no real examples; I still assert that paying $40 for a quart of the stuff will have few of your average consumer (as vs. a company buying the stuff for use in their juice-related products) buying it up and representing a large demand.

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>>>>
What’s incoherent about it? Strawberry juice comes from strawberries. Strawberries are readily available, and extracting the juice at home is not difficult. Why the pressing need to buy it in a jug?
>>>>

Lotsa reasons…

  • Convenience (don’t need to buy a juicer, no cleanup)
  • Cost (don’t need to buy a juicer)
  • taste (I despise fresh squeezed orange juice…the blended premium juices taste much better to me. Could certainly be the same way with strawberries)
    -shelf life
17

Try the Hispanic food section, I think Goya might make strawberry juice or nectar.

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The Hispanic section is where I found the strawberry juice with added sugar (the only strawberry juice that I’ve seen that didn’t have other juices blended into the mix). I agree that Oranges are superior juice fruit to strawberres. However, in a recent trip to Meijers I found a huge variety of pure juices including: Mango, Papaya, Carrot, White Grape, Red Grape, Prune, Pinapple, Tangerine and several other exotic varieties I cannot remember. I think it must be a matter of economics. Although you can buy strawberries for a couple of bucks per quart in season, they are more than double that most of year. Based upon the information above it must take alot of strawberries to give a useful amount of juice (then again from my experience with carrot juicing I can tell you that carrots don’t produce much juice at all, but they are juiced all the time). This combined with their expense, and the lack of a perceived market (whether real or imagined) is sufficient to relegate pure strawberry juice to being a distant memory.

19

Bacardi makes a strawberry puree that, AFAIK, is just strawberries and some preservatives. We use this at work, I imagine you could dilute it with sweetened water or some other way, to get at least a strawberry-juice-like-drink.

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But there’s only one Smitty’s. And I can walk to it.