The Trump administration is giving a boost to the Florida orange juice industry by lowering the federal standard for the amount of sugar required by the Food and Drug Administration to authorize the product.
Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. joined legislators in Florida on Friday to announce the FDA issued a final rule that slightly reduces the amount of naturally occurring sugars that the government requires in pasteurized orange juice.
The rule would reduce the minimum level of natural sugar from 10.5% to 10% to call a product “orange juice” under FDA standards.
The new regulation is a boon for industry leaders in Florida, as domestic citrus crops, such as oranges, grapefruits, and lemons, have grown naturally less sweet in recent years, in part due to changes in climate and pestilence.
Climate-related changes to growing conditions have required orange juice producers to import product to meet the FDA’s requirements to get juice on the shelves. According to Citrus Industry Magazine, Brazil accounts for roughly three-quarters of imported orange juice. Mexico accounts for about 20%.
Kennedy said the citrus industry “has no better friend than President Trump.”
“President Trump wants Americans eating American food and drinking beverages grown on from American-made fruit,” Kennedy said. “He wants strong supply chains that protect U.S. agriculture, and he wants American businesses to succeed against foreign companies.”
Reducing the minimum level of natural sugar from 10.5% to 10% was first proposed via legislation by Sen. Ashley Moody (R-FL), who said the move would better reflect current growing conditions in Florida and protect domestic orange production.
Moody was appointed by Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL) in 2025 to fill the Senate vacancy left by now-Secretary of State Marco Rubio. She is up for her first election to maintain the post in November.
The senator said the Florida citrus industry met with her within the first month of her tenure, and she enthusiastically led the charge to change the standards for orange juice in the Senate before recognizing it could be done through an FDA regulation change rather than legislation.
“All we need is for this agency to start thinking about Americans first, America growers first,” Moody said. “What a novel concept as a country to think of your citizens and your industries first.”
The Department of Agriculture recorded that there were 12.9 million boxes of oranges produced in Florida in the 2025 to 2026 growing season, up 5% from the previous season. But that’s significantly lower than the more than 200 million boxes produced each year in the early 2000s.
Acting FDA Director Kyle Diamantas, who grew up in Florida, said at the event that the state’s citrus industry drives nearly $7 billion in annual economic impact and employs roughly 30,000 people.
Diamantas said that the “agricultural reality on the ground has fundamentally shifted.”
Florida has been hit particularly hard by a plant disease known as “citrus greening,” which is caused by a tiny invasive bug that infects citrus trees by spitting bacteria into their leaves.
To stop the infection, trees produce a chemical that clogs their blood vessel-like structures that transport nutrients. This natural defense mechanism protects the tree from infection, but it limits the amount of sugar made in the leaves through photosynthesis from traveling to the fruit of the tree.
The effects of increasingly severe hurricane seasons have also disrupted the Florida citrus industry, with citrus production dropping substantially following Hurricane Ian in 2022, the third costliest weather disaster on record worldwide. The deep freezes in Florida starting in 2017 have also hindered harvests.
Diamantas said contemporary growing conditions made the FDA’s rules “increasingly impossible for domestic growers to meet through no fault of their own.”
“This rigid, obsolete rule did nothing to protect consumers, and it severely harmed domestic production, particularly right here in Florida,” Diamantas said. “It effectively forced manufacturers to turn away from the Sunshine State and rely on foreign imported oranges just to meet an arbitrary federal number.”
State officials said the rule change would result in an immediate change in the number of oranges that growers can sell to juice producers.
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Moody praised Kennedy and Diamantas, as well as Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins, for their defense of domestic orange production.
“Here is what this administration understands: if we grow it here or manufacture it here, or we need to grow it here or manufacture it here for the safety and strength of our country, let’s get it done,” Moody said.
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[ H/T Washington Examiner ]
