Compare prices for No Name frozen juice concentrate across flavours.
The five SKUs tracked here — pink lemonade, lemonade, fruit punch, berry punch, and grape punch — sit in a specific corner of the chilled and frozen aisle. They are not 100% juice. Under Canadian labelling rules, "fruit drink" or "fruit beverage" indicates a sweetened product containing some juice rather than reconstituted single-strength juice, and frozen lemonades and punches in 283 ml cans typically declare somewhere between 5% and 20% actual juice content, with the balance made up of water (added at the consumer's end after dilution), sugar or glucose-fructose, citric acid, natural and artificial flavours, and colour. The cost stack therefore looks more like a beverage formulation than a fruit-juice product: sweetener, juice concentrate, packaging, and freezing dominate, with the actual fruit input a smaller share than in 100% frozen orange juice concentrate.
The 283 ml can format itself is a relic of the mid-twentieth-century push to commercialize frozen concentrated orange juice, which then expanded to lemonade and punch formulations through the 1960s and 1970s. The format has been in long-term volume decline in North America since the 1990s, displaced by ready-to-drink shelf-stable juice in PET bottles and Tetra Pak, but it has held on as a cost-efficient way to ship a sweetened drink concentrate at roughly a quarter of the volume and weight of the equivalent ready-to-drink product.
Lemon juice concentrate. Lemonade and pink lemonade are anchored on lemon juice concentrate. Argentina is by a wide margin the world's largest exporter of processed lemon products, accounting for roughly half of global lemon juice and oil exports in most years, with production concentrated in the province of Tucumán. The two largest Argentine lemon processors, Citrusvil and San Miguel, dominate global trade in industrial lemon juice concentrate and lemon oil. The United States, primarily California and to a lesser extent Arizona, is the second relevant supplier and the most common origin for lemon juice concentrate moving into Canadian co-pack manufacturing because of CUSMA-compliant tariff-free entry and shorter cold-chain transit. Spain and Mexico round out the supplier base. Canadian co-packers will typically blend Argentine and U.S. concentrate based on relative landed cost and Brix specification.
Grape juice concentrate. Grape punch and a portion of the berry-punch flavour profile rely on grape juice concentrate — predominantly Concord and Niagara grape concentrates produced in the Lake Erie growing region of New York, Pennsylvania, Ontario, Michigan, and Washington State. Welch Foods, the grower-owned cooperative based in Concord, Massachusetts, is the dominant North American processor of Concord grape concentrate. Concord grape juice has experienced significant pricing pressure in recent years as Welch's has reduced contracted acreage and U.S. growers have shifted vineyards to higher-margin wine and table-grape varieties, tightening industrial supply.
Apple, pear, and white grape concentrates. Fruit punch and berry punch use apple and white grape juice concentrate as inexpensive base bulking agents that are sweet, neutral in colour, and shelf-stable. China is the largest global supplier of apple juice concentrate, followed by Poland, Turkey, and Argentina, with Canadian buyers historically pulling significant volume from Chinese suppliers because of cost. Pear juice concentrate is similarly sourced from China, Argentina, and Turkey. The U.S. apple juice concentrate market has been the subject of long-running antidumping investigations against Chinese imports, and as of 2024 the U.S. International Trade Commission continued countervailing duty orders on certain non-frozen apple juice concentrate from China — an action that does not directly govern Canadian imports but tightens global pricing for the residual supply available to non-U.S. buyers.
Berry concentrates. The berry punch flavour profile typically uses a blend of grape, apple, and small inclusions of cranberry, raspberry, or strawberry concentrate for colour and aroma. Cranberry concentrate is sourced almost entirely from Wisconsin, Quebec, British Columbia, and Massachusetts. Raspberry and strawberry concentrate are global commodities with Chilean, Polish, and Serbian supply dominant on the industrial side.
The largest non-water ingredient in any of the five flavours is sweetener. Two pathways are common in this category: refined sucrose, and glucose-fructose syrup (the Canadian regulatory term for what U.S. labels call high-fructose corn syrup).
Refined sugar. Canadian refined sugar is dominated by two players. Rogers Sugar, through its subsidiary Lantic Inc., operates cane-sugar refineries in Vancouver and Montreal and the country's only sugar-beet processing plant in Taber, Alberta. Redpath Sugar, owned by ASR Group of West Palm Beach, operates a cane-sugar refinery on the Toronto waterfront. Raw cane sugar destined for these refineries is imported primarily from Brazil, Guatemala, Australia, and other tropical producers; Brazilian raw sugar is the price-setter for the Canadian refining input cost via the New York No. 11 contract. Refined sugar prices in Canada have been elevated since 2023 due to a combination of weak Indian export availability following successive monsoon-disrupted crops and high Brazilian raw sugar prices driven by competition between sugar production and ethanol blending.
The Taber sugar-beet plant gives Alberta-based food processors a regional supply option, but it operates a relatively short campaign each year (typically September through February) processing the Alberta-grown sugar beet crop, and the volume is small relative to total Canadian refined sugar demand.
Glucose-fructose syrup. Where formulations specify glucose-fructose, the input is corn-derived and produced primarily by ADM, Cargill, and Ingredion at North American wet-corn-milling facilities. Canadian wet-mill capacity is concentrated in southwestern Ontario, with the bulk of glucose-fructose used in Canadian beverage manufacturing produced at Casco/Ingredion's Cardinal, Ontario plant or imported from U.S. wet-mill capacity in the Midwest. Glucose-fructose has historically been a cheaper sweetener than refined sucrose on a per-sweetness basis but the spread has narrowed in recent years.
Price impact. For a 283 ml can of frozen sweetened drink concentrate, sweetener cost can rival or exceed the cost of the juice fraction, particularly for the lemonade SKUs where lemon juice concentrate is the only juice input. Movements in the world raw sugar market or in U.S. corn prices flow through to the cost stack within one to two contract cycles.
Frozen juice and drink concentrate manufacturing in Canada is heavily consolidated. Lassonde Industries, headquartered in Rougemont, Quebec, is the dominant Canadian processor of fruit and vegetable juices and beverages, and operates as the manufacturer of choice for most major Canadian retailer private-label programs in this category. Lassonde owns and produces a long list of national brands including Oasis, Rougemont, Fruité, Allen's, Graves, and Everfresh, alongside its substantial private-label business. In December 2023 Lassonde acquired Old Orchard Brands, a Michigan-based juice and frozen concentrate manufacturer, in a transaction that significantly expanded Lassonde's North American frozen-concentrate processing footprint and effectively positioned the company as the leading frozen juice and drink concentrate producer on the continent.
Lassonde's facilities relevant to the frozen concentrate category include the Rougemont, Quebec headquarters complex and the former Old Orchard plants in Sparta and Frankfort, Michigan. For Canadian retail private label, manufacturing for the western Canadian market is most often executed at one of the Quebec or Michigan facilities and shipped west. There is no large-scale frozen juice concentrate processor operating in the Prairies; western Canada's juice manufacturing capacity (Sun-Rype in Kelowna) is principally focused on shelf-stable apple-based juice rather than frozen concentrates in 283 ml cans.
Compared with shelf-stable juice in PET or Tetra Pak, frozen concentrate is a relatively low-cost format to produce: the formulation is concentrated four-to-one or more, packaging is small, and pasteurization can be milder because the product is held frozen through distribution. The trade-off is the year-round cold-chain cost and the gradual category contraction described below.
The 283 ml frozen-concentrate format is packaged in spiral-wound composite cans — a paperboard body with metal ends seamed on top and bottom — rather than the all-steel cans used for canned fruit, beans, or tomatoes. The composite can is meaningfully cheaper than all-steel for this application, contributes less weight to long-haul freight, and tolerates the freezer environment well. The dominant North American manufacturer of composite cans is Sonoco Products Company (Hartsville, South Carolina); other suppliers include Crown Holdings and a handful of regional converters. The metal ends are typically tin-plated steel sourced from the broader can-making supply chain.
Steel costs flow into composite-can pricing through the metal ends, and packaging-resin prices flow in through the polymer liner that separates the paperboard body from the product. Both inputs have been volatile since 2022 — particularly U.S. and Canadian flat-rolled steel prices, which were affected by the 2025 retention of Canadian counter-tariffs on steel and aluminum imported from the United States after the broader CUSMA tariff dispute was de-escalated in September 2025.
No Name is the discount private-label brand of Loblaw Companies Limited, originally launched in 1978 and now spanning more than 2,500 SKUs across Loblaw banners including Real Canadian Superstore, Loblaws, Independent, and No Frills. Private-label frozen drink concentrate is sold against branded competition from Old Orchard (also Lassonde-owned), Welch's (grape and grape-blend punches), and a thinning set of regional brands. Because the leading private-label co-packer (Lassonde, via Old Orchard) is also the owner of the leading branded competitor in much of the category, the spread between branded and private-label shelf prices in this segment is set primarily by Loblaw's negotiating leverage on the contract pack rather than by genuine input-cost differentiation between the products.
The five-flavour No Name lineup uniformly priced per identical 283 ml can is a deliberate merchandising choice: it lets Loblaw run a single price-point across the set during flyer cycles, regardless of the underlying input differences between, say, a grape-concentrate-heavy grape punch and a lemon-concentrate-heavy lemonade. Under that flat retail price, the actual cost-to-serve for Loblaw varies meaningfully by flavour, with the lemonade and pink lemonade SKUs typically carrying the highest input cost in periods when Argentine lemon juice concentrate is in tight supply.
Frozen drink concentrates are held at -18°C from packing through retail freezer placement. Western Canadian distribution for Loblaw private label flows through the chain's Calgary-area distribution network, with frozen-product handling supported by regional cold-storage operators including Lineage Logistics (which operates three Edmonton-area facilities) and Conestoga Cold Storage. Product manufactured in Quebec or Michigan typically moves west by long-haul refrigerated truck or refrigerated intermodal rail, with the rail option more common for full-trailer-equivalent volumes given Edmonton's distance from origin.
Edmonton's inland position adds both transit days and per-unit freight cost relative to Toronto or Montreal markets, and the cost of refrigerated trucking through the Prairies has been an upward cost driver since 2022, reflecting fuel cost increases, driver availability constraints, and rising costs for refrigeration unit maintenance. The 283 ml composite-can format helps manage this exposure: cube efficiency is high, and the rigid pack tolerates handling well, so freight cost as a share of the landed wholesale price remains lower for this format than for ready-to-drink juice in 1.75 L cartons.
Several trade-policy threads bear on the cost stack for these products.
Canada-U.S. CUSMA tariff environment. Canada imposed 25% counter-tariffs on approximately CAD $30 billion of U.S. goods effective March 4, 2025 in response to U.S. tariff actions, and removed most of those counter-tariffs effective September 1, 2025 after the U.S. allowed CUSMA-compliant Canadian goods tariff-free entry. Counter-tariffs were retained on steel, aluminum, and automobiles. For frozen juice concentrate, the practical implication is that U.S.-origin lemon juice concentrate, grape juice concentrate, and finished co-packed product moving from Old Orchard's Michigan facilities re-entered tariff-free CUSMA-compliant flow in the back half of 2025, after a period of materially elevated landed cost during the spring tariff window.
Steel and aluminum. The retained Canadian counter-tariffs on U.S. steel and aluminum continue to apply upward pressure on the metal-ends component of composite-can packaging where the input is U.S.-sourced. Composite-can converters can substitute toward Canadian-rolled tinplate or to imports from Asia, but switching costs and quality qualification slow the pass-through.
Argentine lemon juice concentrate. Lemon juice concentrate from Argentina enters Canada under most-favoured-nation tariff treatment. There is no preferential trade agreement materially reducing the rate, but the applied MFN rate on industrial fruit juice concentrate is low single digits and has been stable.
Chinese apple juice concentrate. Canadian imports of Chinese apple juice concentrate are not subject to the U.S.-style countervailing or antidumping duties, which means Canadian co-packers retain access to comparatively cheap Chinese apple concentrate as a base for fruit and berry punch formulations even where U.S. competitors face higher landed costs. This is a structural cost advantage for the Canadian private-label channel in this category.
Sugar trade. Canadian refined sugar production from Lantic and Redpath is partially insulated from U.S. competition by the United States Refined Sugar Re-Export Program and by Canadian preferential tariff treatment for raw cane imports under the General Preferential Tariff for least-developed-country origins. The price-relevant policy variables therefore sit primarily in Brazilian and Indian sugar export policy and in U.S. corn ethanol mandates that compete with corn for glucose-fructose feedstock.
Frozen juice and drink concentrate is a long-decline category in North American retail. The format peaked in the 1990s with frozen orange juice concentrate as the anchor SKU; since then ready-to-drink not-from-concentrate juice in PET and Tetra Pak has displaced the bulk of that volume at retail. What remains in the frozen concentrate aisle is principally flavoured drink concentrates — lemonades and punches — for which the format remains cost-competitive against shelf-stable equivalents because the freight and packaging savings of the 283 ml can outweigh the cold-chain cost.
Three forces frame near-term retail pricing for these products in Edmonton. First, refined sugar input costs remain elevated by historical standards and are unlikely to ease significantly until Brazilian and Indian sugar exports normalize. Second, Argentine lemon juice concentrate availability has been variable through the 2024 and 2025 harvest cycles, with weather-driven swings in Tucumán supply pushing wholesale prices higher in the lemonade SKUs. Third, the Lassonde-Old Orchard consolidation has concentrated North American private-label co-packing capacity in fewer hands, which limits the negotiating room for retailers seeking alternative co-packers and supports a stable-to-rising private-label cost floor. Working in the opposite direction, the post-September 2025 normalization of CUSMA tariff treatment has restored tariff-free flow of U.S. concentrate inputs and finished product, removing the spring 2025 tariff premium from the cost stack.