Tropicana flash-pasteurized juice and shipped it fresh in tanker trains

In the early 1950s orange juice meant frozen concentrate, which survived shipping but tasted cooked. Anthony Rossi, running a Florida citrus packing company, refused to be just one of many concentrate producers and in 1954 pioneered flash pasteurization — heating fresh juice briefly and chilling it fast to keep flavor while extending shelf life to about three months.

With waxed paper cartons that made mass retailing possible, Tropicana launched chilled not-from-concentrate juice, dropped concentrate entirely, and by 1957 renamed the company for the brand. New York alone took as much as 40 percent of sales, and Tropicana bought an 8,000-ton ship, the SS Tropicana, to move up to 1.5 million gallons a week to Queens.

When the ship proved too slow to scale, Tropicana switched to bulk rail: insulated boxcars on weekly Florida-to-New Jersey runs, then the 150-car Great White Juice Train, the food industry's first unit train, carrying about a million gallons per trip over 1,250 miles. The company saved an estimated $40 million in fuel in its first ten years.