I’m not going to mention brand names because this is not buzz marketing!

There’s one brand of coconut water that is sweet without any sweetening. The drink is usually pink instead of colorless or cloudy white. It costs about 50% more (sometimes even double) than the other coconut waters.

Those ones taste kind of sour, slightly funky, and a hint of coconut. The pink one is sweet and tastes very coconut-y. It’s nearly as sweet as the coconut juices with added sugar.

All of these contain only one ingredient: coconut water.

It seems like there’s some process to obtain coconut water that makes it delicious but also expensive. What is that process and why don’t more brands do it? (The fact that the prices are so different explains why mass market coconut waters don’t use that process, but it’s weird to me that there’s only one brand of sweet coconut water when the other brands have plenty of competition.)