Personally, I remember very well Soviet juices, both in glass (with a salt shaker and a tomato spoon) and in cans. We bought and drank with pleasure. Now they write how high quality and natural the production of juices was.
Here's a little history …
The mass production of juices under the USSR began in the 1930s. Anastas Mikoyan, People's Commissar of the Food Industry, brought this idea from the USA. There, in America, the Soviet leader spied on the habit of drinking orange juice in the morning.
However, although this seemed like an old tradition to Mikoyan, in fact, the Americans mastered this custom not long before that. That is, oranges, of course, were popular. And to eat half an orange for breakfast, taking out its pulp with a special spoon with jagged edges - everyone loved it. But the inquisitive thought of local entrepreneurs found a new idea. A certain Don Francisco rightly thought: what if you replace the orange with juice? This, after all, not half will be used by everyone, but the whole, or even several! So in 1915 the juicer was invented and won the hearts of millions of Americans. And brought billions to fruit merchants.
So, Mikoyan liked it very much. The problem was that oranges did not grow in the USSR. And the African countries had not yet taken the path of socialist development. And they didn't even try to barter oranges for weapons and tractors.
However, without hesitation, the Soviet leadership found a replacement - tomato juice. Which they began to produce in the famous three-liter cans. In the 1960s, the range expanded - many factories were built. On which they made good juices from apples, pears and plums.
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In the USSR, the industrial production of cheap canned birch sap was established, bottled in three-liter glass jars (a glass of juice cost 8 kopecks, it was one of the cheapest juices).
The cheapness in the USSR and the general availability of the product in the era of widespread scarcity have grown into the wrong and widespread opinion that a surrogate is widely sold in retail outlets instead of natural juice, which in fact can be easily obtained by mixing water, sugar and citric acid in certain proportions.
The most developed was the extraction of birch sap in Belarus, in the north of Ukraine and in the middle European part of Russia.
There was still a problem with the packaging. And the juice was poured into these very huge jars. Later, according to GOST 1974, the following types of juices were produced: cherry, grape, cranberry, apple, pomegranate, pear, plum, and cherry. At the same time, 0.7-liter glass bottles were added to the container.
But if you want to have just one glass, go to the Juices-Waters pavilion or to a special section in the grocery store. Our citizens learned that juices can be conveniently packaged only in 1980, during the Olympics.
At that time, a huge amount of orange juice was purchased, packed in Finland in small tetrapak bags of 200 grams. These cardboard containers came with a plastic tube. In general, everything is as it is today.
But although the bulk juice container was ugly and inconvenient, the juices themselves were sometimes quite good. At least in comparison with modern ones, they were devoid of chemicals and additives.
Unless there was a little sugar in the apple juice. And that is to say, our apples did not differ in natural sweetness. Experts also say that juices were then only directly squeezed. No reconstitution from powder or concentrate.
So, were they really natural juices without any cheating?