Hawaii POG Juice "Beverage of the Breakfast Table"

The carton of pog juice that is by the plantation iced tea (pineapple) and island grown coffee (kona) and Hawaii variation of tea are at many breakfast tables. When people see it they see the tropical feel of a sweet drink that sometimes has an unknown amount of actual juice is something of a treat to locals or a reminder of Hawaii to visitors who drink it elsewhere in a glass. It is not really something people give too much thought into, because it is recalled as the drink that welcomes you with a mixture of passion fruit, orange, and guava. With many people taking pog on the go with them the Pog Juice that was most commercially available was a processed drink available in small cartons or cans that were easy to drink on the go in a cooler or served as a single serving.

While it serves as a daily drink the less processed no colorings, preservatives, and little sugar added is late to the party. When people went to restaurants or stayed at a hotel they would taste the really sugary processed pog and while it was nostalgic and triggered the feeling of childhood those who looked at it for what it was would be more critical of the drink. While there were no requests for fresh pog juice to be made it was apparent that people had thought if there was a 100% juice version as they would taste a drink that might have been too watery, too sugary, or not taste all too natural. People who came to Hawaii wanted to taste those fruits that grew in Hawaii even if it wasn’t all fruit juice they just wanted to know what they were drinking. Those who wanted to know more about the fruits would stop asking for it as it was hard to find places in Hawaii that serve it.

The less processed Pog has come to have three separate juices that maintain their vitamins, minerals, water content, and natural sugars that reflect the original fruit used to make it. Some pog is made from syrup-like concentrate, which involves removing water to create it, so the concentrate is reconstituted with water to make juice. This was thanks to the multitude of drinks that were being created by bartenders and smoothie makers to find out all the different ways they could add pog to a cocktail or smoothie. When pog was in a can it was actually harder to control the amount of each of the fruits contained in the mixture that is pog and separating and deconstructing the juice into fresh individual components made it easier to make new concoctions.

Passion Orange Guava started on the island of Maui at Haleakala Dairy in 1971 as a marketing name with the drink made of juice being made by other competitors like Hawaiian Sun, Aloha Maid, and Meadow Gold. For those who were nostalgic of Hawai‘i they would drink it at breakfast and it would be seen as the go to drink over orange juice that was seen as the mainland alternative. People would see it at Hawaiian Restaurants like Highway Inn, gallon jugs alongside milk in the supermarket to go into Hawaii homes, and in coolers at sports games. The popularity as a breakfast drink would only pick up after Hawaii saw more visitors from Jet-age where it would be served on planes and at hotel breakfast buffets and highly marketed as a healthy tropical drink. The drink would be found in many Hawaii pantries in the late 1980’s with Fresh-Frozen concentrated canned Passion Orange Guava.

The Original recipe used the common guava (Psidium guajava), known locally as "kuawa". And it wouldn't be until later that people started using the widely abundant strawberry guava (Psidium cattleianum), called "waiawi".

Maui has all sorts of varieties of the drink Pog due to all the different ways it is combined with certain amounts of the three fruits of lilikoi varieties, orange varieties, and guava varieties. While it isn't only a drink loved on Maui there are all sorts of drinks involving it, due to its origins being there.

Nutrients involve three fruits that have a nutritional composition made of them. Lilikoi (Passion Fruit) is citrus, sweet, and tart and contains: fiber, vitamin C, and provitamin A. Orange is citrus, sweet, and tart and contains vitamin C, folate, calcium, potassium, thiamine, and vitamin B1. Guava (Strawberry Guava) is tart, sweet, aromatic, and contains: potassium, vitamin C, polyphenols (antioxidant), and hyperoside (mental health). If Coffee isn’t around the natural sugars that are inside the juice worked as a way to start the day with, so maybe that’s why it was a good way to start the day with. There are different ways to make the juice with fruit-extractors: remove skins for fruit powder (animal feed), a mechanical strainer to separate seeds and extracted-juice. Then the single-strength juice is treated for a desired sugar level to be either juice or raise the sugar to make it a concentrate.

POG beverage of the Breakfast Table