More green juice

There's a new juice offering in Tropicana's Farmstand line. It's Tropical Green, and Mr. Tidbit couldn't help comparing it to the slightly less new Healthy Greens from V8.

Differences abound; about the only thing these two products have in common is green, and a 46-ounce bottle. Tropicana's is 100 percent juice and is sold refrigerated; V8's is 75 percent juice and is in the open-shelf juice aisle. Although both contain vegetables and fruit, Tropicana claims both one serving of fruit and one of vegetables in an 8-ounce serving; V8 claims only one serving of vegetables.

Ignoring whether the named fruit or vegetable is present as juice, reconstituted juice or puree, the Farmstand product has four vegetables (sweet potatoes, yellow carrots, kale and spinach); V8's has seven (yellow carrots, spinach, cucumber, celery, kale, romaine lettuce and green bell pepper). The V8 product has two fruits (apple and pineapple); Tropicana's has eight: grape, apple, banana, mango, pineapple, orange, lime and kiwi). Both contain natural flavors, as well as the same two fruits for color (watermelon and huito).

(Until this moment Mr. Tidbit had never heard of huito. FYI, it is a large thick-skinned edible berry that grows in rain forests in the tropical Americas.)

Without getting into matters of preferences, Mr. Tidbit would say that the Farmstand product tastes like fruit and the V8 product tastes like vegetables.

At one store, where V8 Healthy Greens was $2.99, Tropicana Farmstand Tropical Green was $3.04.

Simply water?

While we're in the refrigerated juice case, Mr. Tidbit wishes to call your attention to several new beverages from the Simply Orange Juice Co., which bottles a number of 100 percent juice products.

New are Simply Tropical Juice Drink, Simply Mixed Berry Juice Drink and Simply Fruit Punch Juice Drink. They are 15 percent juice (that's 85 percent water).

At one store, where Simply's 100 percent juices were $3.99 for 59 ounces, the 15 percent juice "drinks" were $2.54 for 59 ounces.

If you bought a $3.99 bottle of actual juice and thinned it with 5 2/3 bottles of water, you'd have 6 2/3 bottles of 15 percent juice for $5.49 (including six empty bottles at, say, 25 cents each). That's just 82 cents each.

Al Sicherman