On August 8, 2025, the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and USDA announced a proposed update to the standard of identity for pasteurized orange juice. The proposal will lower the minimum Brix (sugar level) of pasteurized orange juice from its current value of 10.5 to 10.0. This will “better reflect the natural Brix level of American oranges,” FDA said in its press release. But 60 years ago, the natural Brix of American oranges was 11.8, well above the minimum of 10.5.
This lowering of the Brix standard is in response to a petition from the Florida orange juice processing industry. According to USDA, the average Brix of the Florida orange crop in 2023 was only 9.27. In order to meet the current standard, processors have had to rely on increasing percentages of orange juice imported from other countries, whose oranges have higher Brix values than Florida’s crop. “This America First action will end a 60-year-old rule that hurts domestic farmers and forces reliance on foreign imports,” the FDA said. The proposed rule is open for comments until November 4, 2025.
What eco-ag farmers should be wondering is — what’s wrong with American oranges? Why has their sugar content dropped so significantly in the past 60 years? The processor petition lays the blame on citrus greening disease, which has devastated Florida citrus production since it first appeared in 2005. There is no cure for citrus greening, which causes trees to produce lower yields of lopsided, bitter fruit and eventually die. The Brix decline coincides with the spread of citrus greening, with the average Brix dropping below the FDA standard of 10.5 in 2017 and continuing to drop ever since. Since 2020, it’s consistently been below even the new proposed standard of 10 — a fact not mentioned in the FDA press release.
The proposed standards accept this decline in quality as inevitable and irreversible. But, as Benny McLean explains in a recent interview with John Kempf, published in the May 2025 issue of Acres U.S.A., the effects of citrus greening have been greatly exacerbated by changes in citrus production practices over the past few decades. Increased herbicide use in orchards, abandonment of leguminous cover crops like hairy indigo, lack of genetic diversity, and closer tree spacing in orchards have all made commercial citrus trees weaker and more susceptible to diseases like citrus greening.
What none of the official press releases about the proposed standard change mention is that, if Florida citrus growers were to seriously work on improving the health of their orchards using organic and regenerative practices, it might be possible to again produce oranges as sweet as those grown in 1963. Instead, they’re lowering the standard to say that sickly, bland, slightly bitter oranges are the new normal. But probably no one will notice — the FDA assures us that “this change is unlikely to affect the taste of pasteurized orange juice.”
