This paper presents the results of the first stage of a wider research on the sustainability of the local market strategies adopted by the traditional export-oriented firms in the Brazilian orange juice industry that chose to focus on the local market. This research's originality resides in the fact that, in Brazil, it pioneers the use of strategic management tools to analyze critical strategic problems in one of the most significant sectors of the Brazilian agroindustry. The paper addresses questions regarding the characteristics of these firms'local market strategies and the assessment of their consistency with the implications of the firms' external environmental factors. It provisionally concludes that the firms' local market strategies are congruent with these factors in that they exploit two crucial opportunities, enhanced by the firms' condition of early movers: 1) an increasing market for the nutritional, high quality type of product offered, due to favorable local socio-demographic factors; 2) potential complementors with whom they could establish strategic alliances for the necessary distribution and marketing processes to attend more effectively to the needs of this growing market niche. The importance of the next research stages, namely the field investigations, to validate these results as well as to provide new insights on the strategies' sustainability, by deepening the analyses of all the factors at play, is highlighted.