There's no word that rhymes with Orange... and no story about Oranges as crazy as this!

I read this headline in Bloomberg this morning:

12 million….. The number of orange boxes expected to be produced by Florida this season, the lowest output since 1930.

The state has been removing its historical groves after years of disease.

This brought to mind my own experience with the sunny orchards of Florida... back in the mid-1980s, when we created premium-quality, President’s Choice Orange Juice.

At the time, I was vice-president at Loblaws supermarkets in Canada, responsible for product development and editorial services.

I had just named and created North America’s first premium private label program, President’s Choice, and was defining what would be the first 2,500 products for the brand.

One of them was to be a not-from-concentrate, preservative-free, orange juice from Florida… not concentrated pulp from Brazil, which the national brands were packing.

We had no trouble sourcing the fruit or contracting a juicer to produce our product. But we sure had a tough time finding a suitable translator.

As Canada is officially a bilingual country, all packaging then required (and still does) full translations in English and French in equal-sized print.

We hired an outside firm to translate the English for our labels but the translator was not as meticulous as our team of product developers.

We only caught the translator’s mistake after ALL our stores across the country were stocked with President’s Choice Orange Juice.

In English, the label read:

Freshly squeezed orange juice from the sunny orchards of Florida

The French translation should have been:

Jus d’orange fraîchement pressé provenant des vergers ensoleillés de Floride.

But our translators misspelled orchards, and so this was printed on a million cartons:

Jus d’orange fraîchement pressé provenant des verges ensoleillées de Floride.

In French, orchard is verger.

What the translator had typed was la verge, which, in French, means penis.

If you were a French-speaking Canadian and walked into the orange juice section of one of our stores, you would find quarts of President’s Choice Orange Juice, “Fresh from the sunny penises of Florida.”

I suspect we sold a disproportionately large number of orange juice cartons to French-speaking shoppers who wanted to have a good laugh with their family at home.

Jim