Is Hi-C Orange Still Made?

Your grocer has Hi-C – the original canned orangeade, in both the big 46- and the handy 12-oz sizes. Better buy Hi-C by the case – or you’ll wish you had. Non-carbonated ready to serve economical! (96 big glasses per case!)

If your family likes full, rich orange flavor, they’ll love the taste of Hi-C, Orange Drink. Because Hi-C Orange Drink gets its real orange flavor from real oranges. And every 6-ounce glassful has 10% real orange juice and a full day’s supply of Vitamin C (100% US. RDA).

Hot-packed in enamel-lined 56-ounce cans, the product needed no refrigeration before opening. After test marketing in 1947, Hi-C orange drink was introduced in 1948 with a massive promotional effort, spending thousands of dollars weekly per market on promotions.

An internal company memo was just leaked to Reddit revealing that the brand is phasing out their Hi-C Orange Lavaburst as of next week. The stores that still have it in stock are allowed to keep selling it now, so if you are a big fan, this is your chance to pair it with a Happy Meal.

Who makes Hi C?

Hi-C is a fruit juice –flavored drink made by the Minute Maid division of The Coca-Cola Company. It was created by Niles Foster in 1946 and released in 1947. The sole original flavor was orange.

Niles Foster, a former bakery and bottling plant owner, created Hi-C in 1946. It took Foster over a year to develop the ideal formula for Hi-C orange drink, containing orange juice concentrate, peel oil and orange essences, sugar, water, citric acid and ascorbic acid (vitamin C). The name “Hi-C” referred to its high vitamin content. Hot-packed in enamel-lined 56-ounce (1.66 L) cans, the product needed no refrigeration before opening. After test marketing in 1947, Hi-C orange drink was introduced in 1948 with a massive promotional effort, spending thousands of dollars weekly per market on promotions. Foster entered into an agreement with Clinton Foods, Inc., to produce and market Hi-C, with Foster managing the Hi-C business.

Ecto Cooler was a product tie-in with the cartoon series The Real Ghostbusters, based on the 1984 live- action film, Ghostbusters. It was a rebranded version of an earlier drink from Hi-C called Citrus Cooler, which had been on shelves as early as 1965 and continued to be sold until the rebranding to Ecto Cooler.

In popular culture. Hi-C products appear in the film The Disorderly Orderly. The Hi-C Ecto Cooler drink appears in Season 4 Episode 4 of the Adult Swim series Rick and Morty, and Episode 5 of the Disney+ series Loki.

Ecto Cooler was re-released on May 30, 2016. The color of the drink was green, the same as the original drink. When chilled, the drink’s can changed from a dark green color to bright slime green. Ecto Cooler was met with major backlash from fans due to the limited availability of the drink.

Jerry Lewis played a stock clerk upon whom a stack of Hi-C cans fell in the Market Basket supermarket at 11315 Ventura Boulevard, Studio City, Los Angeles, in the film The Disorderly Orderly.

In early 2019, new packaging was released for the drink boxes, and the calories and sugar have been reduced in half by using a new sweetener. In 2020, Jel Sert started producing Hi-C in drink mix form.