February 05, 2026
Source/Minute Maid
Coca-Cola is retiring its frozen Minute Maid juice products. This writer, who had to mix the concentrate into pitchers on many mornings as a child growing up in the 1980s, shed no tears.
As a child of the 1980s, I have somewhat mixed emotions about the retirement of Minute Maid frozen orange juice. I remember my mom stocking our top shelf freezer – already packed with expired, half-eaten containers of Neapolitan ice cream and freezer-burned sacks of peas – with as many cans of it as would fit. It was as if my mom was preparing to keep us hydrated with Minute Maid frozen "OJ" during the apocalypse.
"Go make the OJ!" my mom would holler from the top of the stairs in the morning before school.
I hated it when my brother and sister recently had had their turns at the job, and it was once again mine. I would defrost the can as well as possible under hot tap, dump its still semi-solid contents into the jug, add three containers of cold water and stir as vigorously as I could with a long wooden spoon until the mixture attained a mostly fluid state.
Sometimes, we purposely left the orange juice a little slushy so it would taste like what we imagined the 7-Eleven Slurpees that we weren't allowed to have tasted like. Other times, we'd sneak into the kitchen after dinner, open a can of Minute Maid and take turns shaving off spoonfuls, eating it like a poor man's sorbet.
Having these intimate memories of Minute Maid's frozen orange juice and sharing the current, collective nostalgia for the 1970s and '80s, I was a little sorry to hear that Coca-Cola was "discontinuing" its "frozen products and exiting the frozen can category in response to shifting consumer preferences," according to a statement released Wednesday. "With the juice category growing strongly, we're focusing on products that better match what our consumers want."
There may be people hunting down some of the "in-store inventory available while supplies last," as Coca-Cola has touted, given the honored place frozen orange has held in American kitchens since 1946. That's when the Vacuum Foods Corp. – a name later, wisely, changed to Minute Maid – began shipping the product around the country, giving consumers a way to enjoy OJ without having to squeeze the oranges.
But even though Coca-Cola, which acquired Minute Maid in 1960, began selling ready-to-drink orange juice in 1973, for some reason my mom was still making us mix up the frozen variety well into the '80s. Maybe she thought the effort built character, although she did relent somewhat to our complaints after many years by buying a plastic jug with a special pump top just for the job. After you plopped the frozen concentrate into it and added water, you pushed and pulled the handle up and down, up and down, until the contents were pummeled into submission.
Memories of this Sisyphean morning task might be enough for me to rejoice upon hearing that Minute Maid frozen orange juice was finally going to meet its maker. But I'm also hoping that the news will help me heal a more profound childhood trauma.
I will try here to make a long, gross story short.
My cousin began to feel car sick during a long family road trip in our Oldsmobile station wagon. So my mom climbed from the front seat, over my siblings, my cousins and me to fish out our juice jug from a canvas duffle bag in the "way-back."
My sick cousin spent the rest of the drive vomiting into the plastic pitcher, my dad pulling over every so often for her to dump it out on the side of the highway.
The next morning at breakfast, my mother unceremoniously plunked down the vomit pitcher – now full of Minute Maid orange juice from frozen concentrate – among our bowls of Honey Nut Cheerios.
"Eeeeew!" we screamed, bailing from the table.
I think my cousin felt personally insulted.
My mom, on the other hand, couldn't understand our revulsion. She had, after all, she said, washed out the jug before mixing up the orange juice.
The experience pretty much soured me on frozen orange juice, with which I was already in an abusive relationship. So finding out that I will no longer have to confront at least the Minute Maid version in frozen sections of grocery stores is, as you can imagine, a relief.
