IEG Vu Global Outlook 2020: Juice market in overall decline

Pure fruit juice consumption is falling in the major markets. Growth elsewhere has not compensated for this.

This is an industry under pressure. The problems facing it are many and varied. They include climate change, whose effects upon production of raw material (the fruits and, increasingly, the vegetables) have been profound. The issue is not so much actual warming, though this is happening, but wild fluctuations in the weather. We are seeing hotter and longer heatwaves and longer and heavier periods of rainfall. This makes it harder and more expensive to plan production, especially in tropical zones where the variations are more pronounced.
Then there is the problem of consumption. Fruit juices are getting a bad press right now, although work by the AIJN and IFU is gamely fighting this. The many sugar taxes, actual and proposed, are focusing on sugar-sweetened soft drinks, which include nectars, and juices are largely excluded, but juices contain sugar and are being demonised just the same. Consumption in the major world markets is falling. See the charts on this page. EU consumption of pure juice fell by 4% between 2014 and 2018 (the most recent data available) and is continuing to decline. The decline in nectars has been steeper. In the US, retail sales of orange juice, once a breakfast staple, have been declining for nearly a decade (though now look like bottoming out). Tariffs are hampering global trade, especially between China and the US and the US and Europe. True, consumption is increasing in regions like Africa and Asia-Pacific, but consumption there is about one-tenth that of the combined EU and US, and it will take many years to reach the levels of these two giant consuming regions.

For all this, there are bright spots. Consumers are trading up: buying better, costlier products. China seems to have leaped (in the major cities, anyway) from juice drinks to cold-pressed NFC juices without bothering with reconstituted juice or even 'ordinary' NFC in the interim.

Cold-pressed juices are gaining traction everywhere, in fact. Consumers still hanker after new, exotic flavours and so the future looks quite bright for tropicals.

Explore more: Global Juice Outlook

Quick ten page read to keep you on top of the juice market. We examine the outlook of the "big three" juices along with the prospects for minor juices.

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This article was published by S&P Global Commodity Insights and not by S&P Global Ratings, which is a separately managed division of S&P Global.