A weekend breakfast is incomplete without a glass of fresh juice but who wants to deal with the mess of squeezing several navel oranges to make a single cup? Store-bought orange juice is the convenient solution if you like to begin your day with a stress-free citrusy spark. However, not all orange juice brands have star quality, which is why we taste tested a bunch of them to help you discern the stellar from the sub-standard. The loser in our list of 15 store-bought orange juices, ranked worst to best was SunnyD Tangy Original because it tasted nothing like regular, fresh orange juice and was packed with additives. We advise you leave it in the chiller cabinet and select a better brand that actually resembles something closer to real fruit juice.
Our tester found that tangy original SunnyD tasted like watered-down orange soda and had a thin texture akin to sports drinks that are packed with sugar. Indeed, the second ingredient on the label after water is high fructose syrup, which explains why it tasted so saccharine. There’s also an artificial sweetener in there called sucralose. Moreover there’s only 2% or less of concentrated orange, tangerine, apple, grapefruit, pear, and lime juice in the total recipe. The thin consistency of this pale imitation of genuine orange juice was closer to a soda without the carbonation and all we could taste was sugar.
Sunny D tangy original contains additives and colors
The clue to SunnyD’s soda-like flavor is in the drink’s tagline: It’s billed as an “orange flavored citrus punch with other natural flavors,” rather than orange juice on the label so it’s more a cocktail of different fruits. Having said that, it’s bright orange in color and sold alongside other orange juices at the grocery store so it would be easy to mistake it for a bona fide bottle of orange juice if you hadn’t come across it before. It also contains additives, including yellow 5. This artificial food color, which is also known as tartrazine, may contribute to hyperactivity in children according to scientific studies, so that’s another reason to avoid it if you have kids at home.
The winner in our taste test was Minute Maid, which is made with 100% pure squeezed orange juice from concentrate. It had a fuller mouthfeel and fresher aroma than SunnyD. Plus it was tangy, bright, and sweet; the perfect combo of attributes for a refreshing and citrusy all-natural juice. The cheaper Aldi brand, Nature’s Nectar, that’s not made from concentrate, came in second place because while it had a similar fresh flavor profile and tangy sweetness, its texture was thinner. However, both of these options were miles ahead of SunnyD and would make an excellent choice if you want your juice to be additive-free. And if you find you have some leftovers, creative ways to use orange juice besides drinking it are to add it to marinades, salad dressing, and even seafood boils.
