It’s a bitter pill to swallow for grapefruit fans, but the once-popular breakfast table staple is disappearing from our supermarket shelves.
Younger consumers despise grapefruit juice because of its tart taste, while older fans find they can’t drink it because it causes side effects when mixed with several popular medications, including statins and some blood pressure and fever pills. hay.
Sales have halved since the pandemic, accelerating a gradual decline since the fruit’s heyday in the 1960s and 1970s.
Across the UK, annual sales have fallen from around 14.4 million liters in the year to May 2021 to just 7.5 million liters in the year to last month, analyst data has revealed. Kantar market.
Asda is understood to have been the first major retailer to take its own-brand version off shelves, in March 2022.
It’s a bitter pill to swallow for grapefruit fans, but the once-popular breakfast table staple is disappearing from our supermarket shelves.
Younger consumers despise grapefruit juice because of its tart taste, while older fans find they can’t drink it because it causes side effects when mixed with several popular medications, including statins and some blood pressure and fever pills. hay.
Grapefruit is known to interfere with the effects of common medications, including cholesterol-lowering statins, which up to 8 million Britons take, as well as the blood pressure drug nifedipine and the antihistamine fexofenadine, among others.
“Grapefruit…can render medications useless or cause more of them to end up in the bloodstream, causing an overdose,” said Star Khechara, a juice therapy instructor who runs the Skin Nutrition Institute’s training center.
“Personally, I love grapefruit juice…but as a user of fexofenadine for hay fever, I have to avoid the juice during the months of June to August.”
Younger shoppers have turned against grapefruit because they prefer sweeter flavors, experts said. The TikTok generation also criticizes the health benefits of juices, which some consider too full of sugar.