NEW YORK (CNN/Money) - Florida orange groves are expected to experience their first serious freeze since 1989 this weekend, and while the cold snap will impact U.S. orange juice prices, the damage seems unlikely to be major.

Temperatures in Florida could fall into the mid-20s Friday and Saturday morning, according to Salomon Smith Barney meteorologist Jon Davis -- not cold enough to damage fruit trees, but enough to ruin some oranges.

"With those temperatures, there's no wide-spread damage across large acres of groves, but there's potentially spotty damage in the hours that temperatures are in the mid-20s," Davis said. "There certainly is a risk of damage later this week."

According to Kevin Barley, an orange juice commodity specialist with Salomon Smith Barney in Orlando, if the freeze damages just 25 percent of the crop still on the trees, that could amount to more than 30 million boxes of oranges, a pretty sizeable chunk of this year's crop, which was expected to total about 197 million boxes.

Worry about the freeze helped push orange juice futures up; the price of a pound of frozen concentrated orange juice for March delivery jumped 3.1 cents, or 3.3 percent, to 96.5 cents in afternoon trading Wednesday.

That price is still well below its 260-day high of 110.3 cents, set back in August, and the recent surge in prices could be reversed after the freeze, depending on the damage done.

"When you get a sensitive situation like this, you develop a 'weather market,' and prices can move dramatically over the possibilities," Barley said. "As you get closer to the event, reality comes back and uncertainty goes away."

Though severe damage could put upward pressure on orange juice prices for months, the impact will be limited by the output of Brazil, which produced about 360 million boxes of oranges in 2002, dwarfing Florida's output.

"Brazil has a balancing effect on prices; we don't have the volatility we used to," Barley said. "In the past, it was all about the Florida crop. With a freeze like this, we could have prices go from 95 cents to $2. That's not the situation now."

In fact, orange juice prices haven't gone higher than $1.30 in the past 10 years, Barley said.

Short-term volatility in wholesale orange juice prices won't mean much to consumers. It will take a longer-term rise in wholesale prices for that to pinch shoppers at the grocery store, and that will happen only if the Brazilian crop is disappointing as well, the commodity experts said.

"If Brazil has a small crop, we could continue to have higher prices for a couple of years," said Barley, adding that the strength of the Brazilian crop will become clearer in the next few months.

A sustained surge in orange juice prices won't have much of an impact on the broader economy, since orange juice sales make up less than one percent of total U.S. gross domestic product (GDP).

But a sustained gain in prices will eventually impact prices paid by producers and consumers, possibly helping to soothe fears that the United States is sliding into a period of deflation, an unstoppable drop in prices that wrecks corporate profits and cripples economies, Japan's being Exhibit A.

"When I take the drought [in the Midwest] this summer with the orange juice situation, I feel more comfortable that, in the next nine months or so, we may see [rising] food prices...add six-tenths of a percent to the producer price index and a little bit to the consumer price index," said Anthony Chan, chief economist at Banc One Investment Advisors. "That makes the argument for deflation that much more unreasonable."