Five charts to start your day

The Great Orange Juice Squeeze continues

Orange juice has nearly tripled in price since the end of the pandemic. Why does this matter? Well, what if orange juice isn't made from oranges anymore? It can happen. The British company Coldpress, which launched in 2011, said it had switched from using oranges to mandarins to combat soaring prices.

Last year, weather and disease reduced Florida’s orange crop to a tenth of what it was a decade ago. Brazil, which supplies 75 percent of the oranges used in juice production, cannot raise output enough to fill this demand gap. There is also a reluctance in Brazil to do so. Millions of trees have been killed by an incurable bacterial infection called citrus greening disease. Farmers are worried about expanding, in case they expose their existing orange trees to the disease.

I published this data visualization last week. It was taken quite lightheartedly by most. But there is a very serious point being made here: the global interconnected systems of food supply that we have constructed in the twenty-first century are vulnerable, and yet we take these important supply chains for granted. When was the last time you thought about where the oranges in that Tropicana bottle you picked up from the supermarket came from?

Source: Eeagli

Coming:

• The internet is not forever

• The internet is full of broken links

• Foreign investments in the US eclipse $25 trillion

• Broadway attendance nears normality

If you like the sound of that line up, this is usually a paid newsletter. You basically get all my best ideas daily. Hit the subscribe button if you are interested and this will be sent to your inbox daily.

---