Don Tai (Canada) Blog

I'll never buy this Old South tetra pack top again. It's messy and tastes awful.

I usually have no issues with orange juice packaging, and as such take it for granted. This is not so for “Old South” orange juice with tetra top packaging. I will never again purchase any product with this type of packaging, no matter how much they go on sale.

Firstly, “Old South”, run by McCain Foods, decided their new packaging should contain less orange juice, so they cut their volume from 355 ml to 330 ml, a reduction of 7%. Because this orange juice is in concentrate, you also add 7% less water, resulting in 100 ml less overall orange juice. Why then is there no 7% reduction in the price of the product?

To add insult to injury, Old South has changed their orange juice formulation and tastes much worse than before. I’m not confident enough with the taste of this orange juice to serve this to my kids, which is a first.

The waxed cardboard tetra packaging is not an issue with me, but the new pull off top has issues. When I use it the concentrate gets all over my hands. While I do wash my hands before I mix the juice, getting concentrate on my hands is wasteful and there is possibility for cross contamination. It is simply not as hygenic as the older external tab packaging.

Thankfully competing orange juice makers have stuck to the older but tried and true 355 ml external tab packaging, which is cleaner and easier to use. In fact, No Frills has their no name orange juice that is 355 ml, old external tab packaging and tastes so much better than Old South. It’s also 20% cheaper, which is a bonus.

The juice market has many large players as well as many packaging forms, which allows me to make my choice of not buying Old South for many years to come an easy one.

New Old South orange juice packaging: new tetra pack + new tetra top + messy usability + less product + worse tasting product + price increase = not in my house.