Tropicana Product is one of the world’s largest producers and marketers of fresh ready to drink orange juice.The company’s primary products are pure and reconstituted orange and grapefruit juice, lemonade fruit punches and grape juice, most of which are distributed nationally.
Tropicana Pure Premium was founded in 1947 in Bradenton, Florida, by Anthony T. Rossi, with the goal of bringing Floridians the kind of orange juice found in Rossi’s home country of Italy. The line is so successful that in 1957 Rossi renames the company Tropicana Products, Inc.
Rossi began packaging and selling fresh fruit to department stores, hotels and restaurants through the United States. As the business grew, he moved to East Bradenton and supplying the ingredients for, among others things, the salads at New York’s fame Waldorf-Astoria Hotel.Rossi produced frozen concentrated orange juice and in 1954 Tropicana engineers developed the process of flash pasteurization, which uses a lower temperature than regular pasteurization but heats the liquid for a longer period of time. This process preserves color and flavor, while still making the juice safe to drink.
By 1958 a convoy of refrigerated trucks transported goods nationally and the SS Tropicana was shipping 1.5 million gallons of juice to New York each week.
In 1978 Rossi retired and sold Tropicana to Beatrice Foods. Tropicana was purchased by Seagram’s in March 1988 for $1.2 billion, equal to about twenty times earnings.
Tropicana was acquired by PepsiCo in 1998. As part of its Tropicana brand, in 2010 PepsiCo introduced Tropolis, an 80-calorie fruit puree snack that comes in squeezable pouches.
Tropicana Products
