You would think making coconut water is mostly about what you add. It is the opposite. At the factory, every decision we made was about what not to do to it.
The water inside a young coconut is already good. The risk is all in the handling, how fast it gets sealed, how little it gets heated, how honest you stay about the recipe. Ours is 99.96 percent coconut water with a touch of ascorbic acid to keep it stable. That 0.04 percent was the most argued-over number in the company.
We tasted batch after batch until the one in the can tasted like the one in the grove. Then we stopped. Stopping, it turns out, is the whole skill.