Delta Air Lines is running short of fruit juice across its domestic operation. Some flights have none, others have a limited supply that’s being restricted to first class, but some still have normal catering because inventories at some airports haven’t been exhausted yet.
JetBlue has also told crewmembers that since July 29 cranberry cocktail has been unavailable and apple juice is being loaded in one-liter Tetra Pak cartons instead of individual cans due to a “supplier production issue.”
Delta and JetBlue use Minute Maid, which is owned by Coca-Cola, and it’s almost certainly a packaging problem at the beverage giant.
Paddle Your Own Kanoo first reported that Delta’s domestic flights were experiencing “temporary supply chain issues” involving apple, orange and cranberry juice. International flights appear largely unaffected.
Passenger reorts are of ‘no juice was available’ announcements but juice being served up front, and no juice for a mimosa from Newark to Salt Lake City. Some reports include tomato juice in lieu of Mr. & Mrs. T Bloody Mary Mix, though that may not be related.
Aviation watchdog JonNYC shared the internal JetBlue notice:
JetBlue too pic.twitter.com/iZKCNyUlxY
— JonNYC (@xJonNYC) August 1, 2026
- Cranberry cocktail is temporarily unavailable, with no replacement.
- Apple juice is being loaded in one-liter Tetra Pak cartons in both business and coach.
- It is the same apple juice, just in different packaging.
- Existing cans will continue to appear until local supplies are depleted.
It’s not an apple shortage, as speculated in some places, the issue is the airline-sized packages since JetBlue can substitute cartons for apple. It’s striking that they’re better able to manage supply chain disruption than Delta, and indeed that Delta is suffering more from a disruption with a Coke company than JetBlue is given their local Atlanta relationship.
Cranberry can be bought at scale online so it suggests an airline sizing supply chain issue.
It seems plausible that the issue is packaging since Coca-Cola told the SEC that aluminum cans are only available from a limited number of suppliers, and because packaging manufacturers have been warning of tight North American beverage can capacity.
Reportedly beverage-can plants are running at 92% – 93% utilization which is genuinely maximum given maintenance and downtime changing between can sizes and labels, and the actual production requirement as basically 110% of sustainable capacity. Demand is highly seasonal with summer as peak. And can manufacturers are scaling up capacity but it’s highly capital-intensive and takes time.
On a one-off basis, supply can be augmented from inside the terminal but that doesn’t work at scale for delivering to planes and packing into galley carts plus handing billing. Airlines may double cater from stations that have greater supply but the issue here doesn’t appear to just be local. There is no reliable restoration date.
At Delta, what you pay has always determined your worth as a human. Now it determines your access to do juice, too. At JetBlue, it just means no individual cans and juice poured from a shared liter carton. Oddly, I haven’t seen issues with these juices at American, United and Southwest which also stock Minute Maid.
Gary, no disrespect, but… ‘the *juice* will not replace us.’ —B6, DL probably.
As you correctly say, Gary this appears to be related to the major fires at the Novelis Rolling and Recycling facility in Oswego, New York in September and November 2025. Both Ford F150 Truck Production as well as Beverage Can Production was impacted. As for Minute Maid, a far more serious situation has developed (at least for customers in Texas) due to their recent decision to exit Frozen Juice Concentrate production. This includes Minute Maid Frozen Lime Juice Concentrate, a critical ingredient in consumer Frozen Margarita preparation. It’s a crisis for sure.
@TexasTJ — Woah… this is the worst “crisis,” ever… very “serious” and “critical,” indeed.
Texas TJ gets it. Gary doesn’t.
Coca Cola does not control its bottlers who distribute its products.
DL has dozens scores more airports than B6 that it has to supply its aircraft from.
And if bottlers in DL hubs are more affected than in NYC, then it doesn’t matter what any relationship is.
@TexasTJ @Tim Dunn — Fellas, if we’re actually gonna take this seriously, and not mock the hyperbole, let’s be clear, Gary is correct; Novelis Oswego makes aluminum sheet metal for Ford F-150s, not beverage cans. Central procurement handles national airline supply contracts—not local bottling plant quirks. Neither of you “got it.”
(And now, ladies and gentlemen, @TexasTJ will attempt to argue that the state of Alaska is run by a cabal of radical leftists… oh, bruther… triple-down, sirs. Call me silly names! I do feed off of it.)
1990
Coke cannot force bottlers to deliver what they cannot.
Another Delta failure. VERY surprising.
LAX-JFK on DL yesterday they had no orange juice. The only juice available was tomato. It was a morning flight and I was looking forward to some OJ. FA told me they were out.
@Tim Dunn — National corporate catering contracts aren’t subject to the whims of local route distributors. Delta’s central supply chain dictates what goes on those carts—not a local bottler throwing in the towel. Try again, harder.
It helps to remember that @1990 is rarely correct, especially when criticizing other commenters because he insists on being “the smartest guy in the room”. Straight from Google: “customers of the Novelis Rolling and Recycling facility in Oswego, New York, include major companies in the automotive, BEVERAGE PACKAGING, and building and construction industries, most notably major North American automakers like Ford.”
1989.5
you still don’t get it – to no surprise and as TexasTj notes.
Coke corporate does negotiate contracts but bottlers fulfill the contracts. Corporate can’t force a bottler to fulfill something they cannot fulfill
The real question is if DL terminates the juice part of the contract or Coke resupplies in another form such as liter cartons. Since DL’s beverage carts, like most US carriers, are set up for 12 ounce cans, it is not a given that they can immediately drop liter cartons into the carts.
That’s it. Delta and JetBlue just suck. Will never fly them again.
Why does B6 not use Pepsi for its juice product fulfillment? Genuinely curious – they certainly have Pepsi products on board (as they should given both NY companies, even if it was a switch from Coke some years back…). Cue the Coke is better than Pepsi and Atlanta/everywhere is better than NY crowd, blah blah blah. Delta/Coke obviously makes sense given Atlanta.
Pretty sure United uses fresh orange juice from a box. Same with apple. Crabapple is always Ina can.
Orange Juice is just an unhealthy sugar bomb. Substitute cans of Yuengling Lager and you will have a more Premium experience on DL.
@TexasTJ, @Tim Dunn — Oof. Wrong again, fellas.
TJ, Googling a plant’s marketing blurb doesn’t change reality. The Oswego fire shut down the automotive line supplying Ford, not can stock. Next time, Bing! it…
Tim, you really should know that “fulfillment” doesn’t work the way you think it does for airline catering. Local bottlers don’t dictate fleet-wide packaging formats when they can’t fulfill an order; master corporate contracts mandate standardized replacements top-down across the network. Local bottlers follow the corporate supply spec; they don’t invent it.
Next, please try calling me more silly names instead of just lying on here.
@1990: Do you always lie to pretend that you are always right ??? The fires absolutely affected the Novelis Beverage business. It’s a fact: Multiple sources confirmed Novelis declared Force Majeure on ALL of their customers, specifically including their Beverage Container Customers. Fellow readers and commenters, I suggest always checking what @1990 says, there’s a reasonable chance in every case that he’s not telling the truth, in order to look like the smartest guy in the room.
@TexasTJ — You Googled (or, Bing!’d) a buzzword you don’t understand to cover for a bad guess. Oswego’s fire shut down the lines making truck bodies for Ford, not soda cans. The beverage world didn’t run out of aluminum, and Delta didn’t switch to juice cartons because of a legal letter from an aluminum plant last year. ‘Facts don’t care about your feelings.’ So, I would say “stop embarrassing yourself,” but I kinda wanna see what you say next. Wait… does the “J” stand for “juice”?
@1990… Wow, you’ve doubled down for the third time, and simply continue to lie. By the way, I don’t use Google as a fact source. Apparently you don’t understand technology: Google is not a data source, it is a search engine, and posts actual data sources from their native sources. As for Novelis, please go to www-dot-novelis-dot-com, and you will see that yes, they do produce rolled aluminum sheet for beverage cans. You can also verify that Novelis did in fact issue a Force Majeure for Beverage Can customers. Full stop, just stop the lies.
@TexasTJ — I’ll keep repeating reality.
Meanwhile, you’ll cherry-pick a random fact (a factory makes aluminum), then mis-apply it to what actually happened here. It don’t work that way, Texas.
You made the same errors in Gary’s recent Alaska case post. (TJ usually just latches onto a theory, often a bad one, and then keeps digging that hole, deeper, deeper.)
It seems you aren’t used to anyone calling you out. It’s gotten so bad that you had to ‘Google’ what ‘Google’ is. Yikes, man. Yikes.
What you guys are missing is the impact of climate change and illegal immigrants on this. If it was not so hot people would drink less juice. And if we had less illegals drinking all that juice then there would be more juice. See? We can turn it back to politics so u guys can fight the way we used to…
@1990, you mistake your own bluster for actual facts. You have yet to refute that Novelis makes rolled aluminum sheet for beverage cans, and that they declared Force Majeure due to the fires (Both are absolute fact, and both are spelled out on their own web site). Tired of you making personal insults as opposed to debating technical facts on their own merit.