Okay, so let me be a contrarian.
I'll confess that, as a bottle baby, I probably intrinsically react positively to consistency in my food. I will also confess that I'm not a big fan of fresh fruit because … well, one piece might be fabulous, and another piece might be way past prime. Sometimes that holds true to separate bites of the same piece of fruit.
(Plus sticky fingers from juices leaking all over, but I digress.)
So, yes, I'm probably programmed to actually think well of something like this. But, heck, I don't think there's something necessarily wrong with formulating juice components to create a consistent taste. I mean, in this particular case, it's not like the are adding in sodium benzophosphate agar gum sulfite to preserve flavor. They are simply blending different juices to create a consistent juice flavor, even if the stock that arrives tastes differently.
If it was a winery, it would be called art.
Embedded Link
Who Wants a Nice Tall Glass of Coca-Cola’s Algorithmic Orange Juice?
Coca-Cola won’t say how it makes its best-selling Simply Orange orange juice, but one thing is for sure: It’s not so simple.
Google+: View post on Google+
Yeah, well, a couple of minutes with Google will show you that juices these days are no better than sodas.
Dave does have a point about the fact that we would have no problem with blending for taste if it was wine. The sugar content of juice is a different question.
Bingo. We're not dealing with engineered additives, we're dealing with a mathematical recipe. The stuff is, mostly, natural. And I'm okay with that, even if it's being done at a large scale by mathematical algorithm.
+Scott Randel — Oh, I know that juice (both in general and especially "juice drinks") are just loaded with sugar. And in fact, that's not just true with "juices these days," but fruit juice as a drink. That's one reason I don't drink as much as I might otherwise.
It's not the blending per se I object to (you can find my own comments at the linked piece). It's the amount of contortions being gone through mostly to obtain a year-round supply of a product that really does have only a three month season. That includes long supply lines (Brazil, in the piece).
I like a red blend as much as the next guy (assuming the next guy is Guido from Lago di Como). But I also like single-malt scotch. I prefer craft beers over Budweiser. I like inconsistency, because that's the hallmark of the world as it is, rather than the world of superfluous engineering. (Ie, a house to keep warm in the winter? Fine. A house milspec'd to endure all possible temperature variations in all possible theaters? Enhhhh… Not so much.)