LAKELAND — A Brooklyn woman has fired a legal arrow straight toward the heart of Florida’s Natural Growers.

Alexandra Axon has challenged the Lake Wales juice processor’s claim that its premium product, Florida’s Natural Growers orange juice, is indeed “natural” as declared in its name and images on the OJ carton. Axon claims the acts of processing the juice and trace levels of a common herbicide in it mean the product cannot claim to be natural.

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The Richman Law Group in Brooklyn filed the class-action lawsuit on July 20 against Florida’s Natural and its parent company, Citrus World Inc., at the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of New York, also in Brooklyn.

Bob Behr, Florida’s Natural CEO, naturally disputed Axon’s claim.

“Florida’s Natural is a natural product,” he said in an email statement. “Our juice is made from just one ingredient, Florida oranges, with no additives or preservatives. Furthermore, we follow all standards of natural products set forth by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and are proud that our orange juice complies with these standards.”

One issue claimed in the lawsuit is that Florida’s Natural OJ contains glyphosate, a widely used herbicide in Florida citrus groves, according to several University of Florida horticultural scientists.

The lawsuit claims testing by an independent lab revealed 5.11 nanograms per milliliter of glyphosate in Florida’s Natural OJ.

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While the FDA does indeed enforce “residue tolerance” levels of various chemicals in food products, the standards themselves are set by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, said FDA spokeswoman Megan McSeveney in an email.

McSeveney provided a link to the EPA website listing residue tolerances for scores of fruit, vegetables, nuts, animal products and other foods. Orange juice is not listed.

The closest to it is a listing for whole citrus fruit, which can have no more than 0.5 parts per million of glyphosate. A level of 5.11 nanograms equals 0.005 parts per million.

Axon’s lawsuit appears to be piggybacking on more than 300 ongoing lawsuits filed in a San Francisco federal court against the Monsanto Co., which created glyphosate in the 1970s and is a major retailer of the herbicide in products such as Roundup. The lawsuits filed by cancer victims claim the chemical caused their disease.

The trial began last month with both sides presenting dueling testimony from scientists on the issue of glyphosate as a carcinogen.

A leading Florida researcher in weed science, Ramdas Kanissery, assistant professor of horticulture science at the Southwest Florida Research and Education Center in Immokalee, said glyphosate is effective only when applied after weeds emerge. Growers are advised to keep the chemical spray away from trees because the chemical will kill fruit if it makes contact.

EPA limits the amount of glyphosate a citrus grower can apply annually, Kanissery said. The limits vary by product.

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“For instance, if they are using the glyphosate product Roundup PowerMAX, the product label suggests that the combined total application on a tree crop production site must not exceed seven quarts of product per acre per year,” he said.

But there is no scientific data on whether current usage levels can result in glyphosate making its way into orange juice, he said. That is theoretically possible if the chemical residues in the soil were absorbed by the tree’s roots.

Kanissery is conducting research to answer that question, he said.

Gene Albrigo, emeritus professor of horticulture at the Citrus Research and Education Center in Lake Alfred, agreed minor levels of farm chemicals could make its way into orange juice but not enough to affect human health.

“It’s all safe, and people live to be much older than they used to thanks to better nutrition and medicine so (herbicides) are not wiping out the world,” he said.

The lawsuit also claims that the manufacturing methods of producing orange juice render the product as not natural. It mentions deaeration, the process of removing oxygen as a preservative; blending and long-term storage.

“No reasonable consumer would view orange juice processed in this way as ‘natural,’” the lawsuit states.

The lawsuit asks the judge to declare the lawsuit a class action composed of all U.S. purchasers of Florida’s Natural products. It seeks an unspecified compensatory damages, including treble and punitive damages, and an injunction against the company from further use of and advertising as a natural product.

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