Manufacturers love it because they can hide what they're putting in, so you'll never really know what you're getting.

In the case of orange juice, it can mean you're drinking something that's come from overseas, and may contain ingredients that ca do you harm.

Orange juice is the most popular juice in Australia, and we spend a billion dollars a year buying 300 million litres it.

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• Country of Origin aisles
• Anything but Australian made
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Our love of OJ is only getting bigger, with sales growing 12 per cent a year, but it appears that the juices sometimes mask dangerous chemicals.

Most of the bottles of orange juice on the supermarket shelves don’t contain Australian juice, even though the labelling says ‘Made from local and imported juice’. In fact, often the only thing local is the bottle and water.

The orange juice concentrate largely comes from Brazil, where dangerous chemicals banned in other countries are still used widely.

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Testing this week in the United States of bottled juices found Carbendazim in bottles of orange juice made with Brazilian concentrate - Carbendazim is one of the most dangerous fungicides.

Citrus Australia chairwoman Tania Chapman is horrified at the discovery.

She points out if it’s in US juices, it will be in Australian juices as well.

Citrus grower Ron Gray says more testing isn’t the solution as the juice should simply be banned. He's been campaigning against imported juice concentrate, in part because of Brazil's use of toxic chemicals.

Carbendazim has been banned in Australia for two years, and it's illegal to use it in the US.

“I’ve never heard of anyone using it here. We just don’t have the need for it,” Gray said.

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While only low levels of the fungicide were found in the juice, the US Food and Drug Administration are doing its own orange juice testing for the fungicide. If the levels are found to be unsafe, they'll remove the products from sale.

Here in Australia though, farmers feel no one is fighting for their rights.

“I have to produce my crop, I have to have a quality assurance program, I have to have a chemical user’s certificate. I have to have all these things, yet the people we’re importing stuff from haven’t shown their quality assurance program or their chemical user’s certificate,” Gray said.

Yet the imported juice concentrate sells for 30 cents a kilo, compared to a paltry five cents a kilo that Gray gets.

“We put so much pressure on us to produce a clean, green product, yet we let anything into the country,” he said.

Today Tonight recently tested every orange and apple juice available on the non-refrigerated supermarket shelves from Coles, Woolworths and Aldi. Traces of the fungicide Imazilal were found in the Berri and Golden Circle orange juices - a chemical not widely used here.

In the Coles apple juice a trace of another fungicide, Captan, was found. Yet since the story aired, Food Standards Australia and New Zealand haven’t flagged any further testing of imported juice concentrate.

Orange juice suppliers and supermarkets responded today to say they all comply with our food standards, and that their products are tested independently to ensure there are no nasty toxins.

However Gray says the only way forward is to buy refrigerated juice that’s 100 per cent Australian, and ban imported juice.

This reporter is on Twitter at @LauraSparkes7

Response statements

• Woolworths

The Woolworths Quality Assurance (WQA) program requires regular Maximum Residue Limit (MRL) testing must be undertaken by our suppliers. We also conduct additional testing on an 'as needs' basis depending on issues identified in the industry worldwide.
Woolworths Homebrand orange juice sourced from Brazil is sourced from suppliers that are required to meet the carbendazim levels prescribed in the USA (<0.01 parts per million), EU (0.2ppm) and Codex (<1) - these are significantly lower than the prescribed limit in the Australian Food Standards Code.
Following this issue being raised in the USA late last week, we have organised as a precautionary measure at the manufacturer level and Woolworths level for stock to be analysed for carbendazim. Raw materials used from Brazil in Homebrand Chilled Orange Juice conform to the Australian Food Standards Code as well as the US, EU and Codex standards. We are yet to receive results on Homebrand longlife juice, however, I would point out that this has been through previous WQA testing.

• Coles

Coles stocks a number of different fresh and ambient juices made from Australian and imported ingredients. For example our 1.5 litre fresh orange juice is made by a Queensland supplier using only Australian oranges. However in common with many other Australian manufacturers our suppliers do use a mix of imported concentrates, including some Brazilian, US and Israeli orange juice in a number of other juices.
All of our labelling meets country of origin requirements under the Food Standards Code and the ACCC guidance on country of origin labelling. We believe these laws could be improved to make it easier for customers to identify Australian products. This was the basis of our submission to the Blewett Review of food labelling.
We do everything we can to ensure customer trust in Coles products and would never do anything to undermine this trust. We only work with suppliers who can guarantee quality and we have in place rigorous testing programmes to underpin this. Our suppliers routinely test for the presence of all regulated substances to ensure that they meet government regulations. This includes carbendazim and our suppliers tell us that they have not found any regulated materials present in product over permitted levels. Clearly if this were to change we would not hesitate to act in the best interests of our customers.

• H.J. Heinz

All Golden Circle products are made in accordance with the company’s strict quality assurance procedures and comply with Australian food safety and labelling requirements.