It’s hard to imagine a Florida breakfast table without orange juice, but the drink’s rise to fame owes much to Bradenton. Long before Tropicana became a global giant, it started with one man, Anthony T. Rossi, who arrived in Manatee County after stints in Miami and New York.
Rossi had already run one of the city’s first self-service grocery stores in Queens and later managed The Floridian, a cafeteria across from the Manatee courthouse. His side business of packing and selling fruit sections eventually gave him the idea to ship pre-cut citrus salad to hotels up north, a gamble the Florida Citrus Commission thought would fail. Rossi proved them wrong, and Tropicana was born in 1947, according to History of Tropicana and Manatee County Citrus, Manatee County Historical Society report, p. 1.
By the late 1940s, Rossi expanded from fruit sections to orange concentrate. He purchased an old grapefruit cannery in Bradenton and began scaling up operations. Soon, Tropicana’s reach extended well beyond Manatee County. Rossi built freezer warehouses, introduced new extracting machines, and even repurposed a storm-damaged warehouse roof into a makeshift greenhouse—housing 9,000 tomato plants and 4,000 fig trees ( p. 2)…