The search for a packged orange juice that tases as good as fresh squeezed is a quest that rivals the hunt for the Holy Grail in futility. The villain in this case is pasteurization – heating the juice before packaging it effectively kills the flavor while increasing shelf life. If you’re lucky, however, your supermarket stacks Just Pik’s from the aptly named Fresh Juice Company. The secret is simplicity itself – pick the fruit at the peak of ripeness, squeeze the juice, and immediately freeze it in the plastic container. Once thawed, you have juice that tastes exactly as it did when it was frozen-fresh and delicious.
Having conquered the taste dilemma, the company extended the Just Pik’s line from orange juice to grapefruit, then added a full range of flavors – apple, cranberry, lemon, carrot, and lime juice and iced tea. Each comes in liter and junior (quarter-liter) sizes and is easy to pick out in the supermarket frozen food section because it’s color-coordinted – grapefruit is yellow; lemonade, pink; cranberry is purple and of course, orange is orange.