Fruit juice grams per cup: apple, orange, grape, cranberry and more compared

A US cup of fruit juice weighs between 240 and 256 grams, a little more than the 236.6 grams of a cup of water, and the dissolved sugar decides where each juice lands. Concentrates, with most of the water boiled off, weigh 281 to 315.5 grams.

All weights are for a US cup of 236.5882365 ml; a tablespoon is a sixteenth of it. A range means the sources disagree by more than this site’s tolerance for that kind of ingredient, so no single figure is chosen. King Arthur’s figure is shown where this site records one, with the verdict on it. Each ingredient’s own page has every source and the full reasoning.

Juice is easy to measure by volume. A liquid fills the cup completely, with no air between particles, so the filling method that changes a cup of flour by a fifth makes no difference here; what changes the weight is what is dissolved in the juice. Sugar, acids and minerals are all denser than water, and every 10 percent of dissolved sugar adds about 4 percent to the weight of a cup.

The light end is coconut water, about 95 percent water, at 240 grams a cup, and the citrus juices: lime 242, lemon 244, grapefruit 247 and orange 248. Apple juice weighs 248 grams by USDA, with laboratory measurements at 246 to 248, and pineapple, pomegranate and blueberry juice all sit between 248 and 250. The sweet end is grape juice at 253 grams, cranberry juice and cranberry juice cocktail at 253, and prune juice, the sweetest and thickest, at 256.

The FDA sets a minimum strength, in degrees Brix, for each 100 percent juice made from concentrate, and the sucrose table turns that into a weight: apple at 11.5 °Brix weighs 247 grams a cup, pineapple at 12.8 weighs 248, grape and pomegranate at 16 weigh 251 and prune at 18.5 weighs 254. Every published figure here sits within 2 percent of its minimum.

Three published figures fail that check and are rejected. Health Canada's apple juice and pomegranate juice rows are both too light for juices that sweet, though the same table agrees with USDA for grape, pineapple and prune. And one USDA record for cranberry juice cocktail, 271 grams a cup, lists so much water that the water alone would fill the cup.

Concentrates are syrups. Thawed apple juice concentrate weighs 281 grams a cup and 68 °Brix tart cherry concentrate 315.5 grams, where King Arthur's 336 grams is rejected. For any juice, a liquid measuring cup filled to the line is accurate to within a few grams; weigh only when a recipe gives grams.