How Chef Gary FX LaMorte Uses His Goodnature X-1 Mini Pro
Juice presses are gaining popularity in the culinary scene with chefs getting creative with how they are using the equipment as part of their tool-set. Chef Gary FX LaMorte, specifically, is expanding the concept of “cold-pressed” to include broths for traditional seafood cuisine. “Having the Goodnature X-1 Mini in Our Arsenal of Equipment Gives a Competitive Edge in the Kitchen. Cold-Pressed Savory Raw Broths Such as Aguachile and Gazpacho Are Far More Superior than Traditional methodology.” – Chef Gary FX LaMorte
What are Goodnature Customers Saying?
As you read through these inspiring stories from our customers, you will find that it’s not just about the awesome juice our juice machines make, but more importantly about the willingness and ability to provide support to our Goodnature family all over the globe, in every possible way that we can.
Best Juice Bars and Juice Cleanses in San Diego
San Diego is known for having delicious, locally-sourced food and drinks, including juice! Everyone loves treating themselves to a crisp, cold-pressed juice. If you’re looking for the best juice bars around San Diego, you have found the right list. Best Juice Bars in San Diego Liv Juice Bar and Smoothies 1225 University Ave, San Diego, CA This small but quaint juice bar in San Diego carries a handful of various raw juices. In addition to juice cleanse plans, they offer juice selections with intuitive names such as their Skin Tonic Juice, Eye Opener Juice, Flu Fighter Juice and more. I’ll take 100, please! Liv Juice Bar also serves a large array of healthy smoothies, sandwiches, and soups. Juice Alchemy 3156 5th Ave, San Diego, CA Juice Alchemy is a made-to-order juice shop that focuses on serving fresh ingredients from local farmers. They offer fresh juices, smoothies, wellness shots, and more. If you like starting your morning off with a fresh-pressed celery juice, Juice Alchemy has you covered. Juice Wave 3733 Mission Blvd, San Diego, CA In 2014, Juice Wave made its first debut in a food truck at the North Park Farmer’s Market. After a year of operating out of the food truck, they opened their first-ever brick and mortar location in Mission Beach. Their menu includes a wide array of cold-pressed juice, wellness shots, acai bowls, nut mylk and more! I’m not sure about you, but the Blue Velvet almond milk with alkaline water, blue majik vanilla bean, and dates sounds amazing! Best Juice Cleanses in San Diego Nekter Juice Bar They offer four locations around San Diego Regardless of where you’re at in San Diego, you’re bound to find a Nekter Juice Bar location near you. They serve handcrafted juices, smoothies, and bowls packed with nutrient-dense ingredients you can’t say no to! Nekter also provides foolproof cleanses and juice detoxes for their customers – choose from their two packages, Celery Detox or Classic Detox. Through their website, you can easily customize your cleanse duration and any add-ons that you would like. If you’re looking for fresh and easily accessible juice in San Diego, Nekter Juice Bar is a great place to visit! Vitality Tap 5980 Village Way, San Diego, CA 650 1st Ave, San Diego, CA Vitality Tap carries organic juice, shooters, superfood bowls, smoothies, and juice cleanses! You can easily stop in and grab your favorite juice while on the go (they also offer 64oz growlers so you can stock up for later). Choose from their wide selection of juice cleanses such as the Starter, Lifestyle, Slimming, and more.
Juicero Rises From the Dead as a Soap Machine
Juicero is known as one of the worst technology startup disasters in recent history. The company raised $120 Million from big name VC’s like Kleiner Perkins and Alphabet Inc. (yes, that’s Google), and about a year later went kaput.
Spread the Juice – Denver
Denver has long been known for its craft beer and is the home to more breweries than any city in the United States – with the exception of Chicago. It is no wonder then, that the mile high city’s appreciation for quality handcrafted beverages has resulted in a juice boom with a growing demand for true, cold pressed juice. A few weeks ago while traveling to Denver for a conference, I decided to take the opportunity to visit some of our juice bar customers and see what they were up to. As I started doing my research, I realized that the majority of the juice bars offering fresh, cold pressed juice in Denver are part of the Goodnature family! I made it my mission to visit as many of them as I could, including two new lifestyle brands that are opening very soon. Stay tuned for juice recipes from some of these awesome juice bars! Read on for a tour of some of the best places in Denver to find real cold pressed juice or scroll down for the list. The Juicing Tree Website: juicingtree.com Instagram: juicingtree.com This is where it all began. The Juicing Tree was the first cold pressed juice bar to set up shop in Denver, opening in 2012. Fast forward seven years, The Juicing Tree is a solid fixture in Denver with two locations. Paul started The Juicing Tree with just a few Norwalk juicers and since then has added two Goodnature X-1s to keep up with the demand. The thing that stood out to me more than everything else at The Juicing Tree is the extensive menu with its unique and flavorful juices. Paul credits his large variety of juice and juice ingredients on his need to ‘always be creating’ and perfecting recipes that can be consistently replicated. I was able to sample many of the juices and nut mylks, all of which tasted amazing, but my two favorites were “Jumpsuit” (Arugula, fennel, celery, granny smith, ginger and lime) and “Insalata” (kale, spinach, romaine, chard, celery, cilantro, cucumber, leek, jalapeno and lemon). Jumpsuit had a very distinct licorice flavor due to the fennel, which I love. Insalata tastes uncannily like gazpacho, and in my opinion is a great meal replacement juice. Sound yummy? Well they are!
The War on Raw Juice
It’s a warm day in Miami, the type where the sun feels good but not too hot, the perfect amount of ocean breeze. I’m laying on a reclining chair on the beach, head tilted back, enjoying the peaceful rumbling sound of the ocean in the distance. Like the Millennial I am I opened my phone to check Instagram… I saw something that gave me a sinking feeling in my stomach. Our fellow juicepreneur Katie Raquel, owner of Katie’s Coldpress in Monterey, California, was forced by the government to shut down her new juice bar that she opened on her local Army base, the Presidio. It was just three months earlier at JuiceCon 2018 that Katie announced she would be opening that very same juice bar, with much support from the audience. Not in my country…? At first I thought there must be some mistake! Certainly our own US government wouldn’t make it illegal for our service men and women to nourish their bodies with the water from fruit and vegetables! But then reality set in—this is America where we have the juxtaposition of being the largest consumers of raw juice in the world, yet also have the strictest regulations, banning it for wholesale distribution. And apparently, any distribution at all on a Navy base according to their Tri-Service Food Code. Here is the language regarding juice in the food code: 3-202.110 Juice, treated* Commercially processed Pre-PACKAGED JUICE shall– (A) Be obtained from a processor with a HACCP system as specified in 21 CFR Part 120 – HACCP Systems; N and (B) Be obtained pasteurized or otherwise treated to attain a 5-log reduction of the most resistant microorganism of public health significance as specified in 21 CFR Part 120.24 – Process Controls. So, there you have it. If you plan on bringing bottles of juice onto a military base, even if it’s sold direct to the consumer, it must be pasteurized or HPP’d. This was a surprise even to the inspectors that approved the space, and to the excited troops and Commander who hosted a ribbon cutting ceremony for Katie. Word came down from the higher-ups that Katie must CEASE and DESIST immediately selling juice to the troops, for their own safety (oh, please). Terrible? Yes. But surprising? Not really. The government has generally taken a strong stance against the distribution of raw juice in the US since 1996, immediately following the Odwalla E. coli outbreak.
5 Inspirational Photos by Goodnature Customers
Lately some of the Goodnature family have been getting really creative with veggies and their juice machines on Instagram, check out what they’ve been up to. Can you top these?? Tag @goodnaturepro on Instagram with hashtag #goodnaturefamily and we will re-share with the community! Juice Box Las Vegas The first one is from @thejuiceboxlv with a celery display on their X-1 Mini: Juice Life This display of asparagus in their Goodnature X-1 is by @juice.life.salisbury: Glow Juicery This one—possibly the most unique—is by @glowjuicerpei in Canada. Although I don’t recommend juicing tulips, I certainly won’t say it can’t be done! Main Squeeze These two are my favorites, displaying full recipes in the hopper of their X-1, by @mainsqueezejuiceco_lc: Excited to see how this trend develops, what can you do with your juice press? #Goodnaturefamily
Choosing an eCommerce Platform for Your Juice Business
This is a follow-up to our previous article How to Sell Juice Online via eCommerce. Setting up an eCommerce site for your juice company may seem daunting or downright scary if you don’t have experience in doing business on the internet. The good news is that it’s 2019, and doing business online now is far easier than it was a a decade ago, or even a few years ago for that matter. An eCommerce platform, also referred to as an eCommerce CMS (content management system), will allow you to get selling online without building a website from scratch with code. Choosing an eCommerce Platform One of the most important decisions you need to make is which platform to choose to start your eCommerce site. There are two we’re going to compare: WooCommerce and Shopify. WooCommerce and Shopify These are the eCommerce platforms that most small business owners use. They are intentionally made to need minimal customization and have full control via a content management system (CMS) that is easy to use for most users. Both can be customized to feel like a branded, integrated experience for your customers. WooCommerce is a plugin for WordPress, which many small businesses use to host their website. Shopify is also a plugin for WordPress, but can be used on its own as a standalone application. In my experience When I was evaluating eCommerce solutions for Goodnature back in 2013, these were the two I was looking at. At the time, both WooCommerce and Shopify were about equal in functionality and features. I ended up going with WooCommerce, which has worked well for us. Since then, however, Shopify has made substantial investments in their software and in my opinion has taken the lead for being the right choice for small businesses. Why Shopify Shopify easily integrates with most of the other cloud based software you might be using in your business, and there are great resources available online offering plenty of self-help. You will likely need to customize the theme (the way it looks), and there are plenty of skilled developers available that can help with this as well. The best part is that Shopify will only cost you $29 – $299 per month depending on how many staff users and which features you need. Pro Tip: There is some great inventory and order management software specific for juice companies coming as a plugin app for Shopify in 2019. Shizu Okusa of JRINK / Wellthy & Co. gave a presentation about it at JuiceCon this year.
How to Sell Juice Online via eCommerce
This is a guest post by Shizu Okusa, founder and CEO of Wellthy & Co., a boutique of wellness brands JRINK (liquid convenience), and Apothékary (the farmacy of the future). Be sure to watch her speech from from JuiceCon 2018 on the same topic and more. Discuss on the Goodnature Juicing Facebook Group. Why Sell Juice Online If you’re currently selling juice in your own stores, or in others in the case of HPP brands, it’s absolutely critical to be thinking about online as a new sales channel. With almost every industry getting “Amazon’d”, why should customers come to your store or order from you directly? It’s about brand, customer retention and a seamless omni-channel experience. Now when we talk about online, we’re not talking sales via DoorDash or UberEATS but rather your own direct-to-consumer (“DTC”) channels. With DTC, companies are able to speak, engage, and commerce directly with their customers meaning margins are higher, lifetime values (“LTV”) are longer, and most importantly as entrepreneurs you have control. Not only is DoorDash, etc. expensive in terms of commissions but they are an intermediary between you and your end customer. Thinking about building your own DTC channel? Here are some things to consider: 1. Your team should be omni-channel. Make sure your managers and retail staff are set up for success with the right technology, tools and answers for basic customer service questions. At the store level you’re familiar with everything going on in the store but with online, it’s a completely separate business. Being transparent about orders placed, ETA of drivers, etc will be critical for businesses looking to offer customers a full omni-channel experience. 2. Don’t try to do everything yourself. It’s tempting to want to save costs and do everything yourself but in this case, think about the value of your time and comparative advantage of hiring or outsourcing the following: the last mile delivery (ie the actual delivery of orders from your kitchen to the customer house), developing the website, ads for paid acquisition, producing the juice. Thanks to Google and rich communities like the one Goodnature has created, ask for help! It’ll save you time and money to lean on others, especially in white space opportunities of selling juice digitally. 3. Familiarize yourself with the basics of a marketing funnel. When you have a brick & mortar shop, you might not have to think about a marketing funnel but in the case of bricks & clicks, you will. How are you doing lead generation? What are you doing to spread brand awareness? Where are you getting customer emails? What content are you sharing that customers want to do read and will engage with? A few questions to think about. 4. Invest in your supply chain. Nothing is worse than pulling online orders from your store and having nothing left on the shelves for those coming into the shop. Forecasting PARS, taking inventory, knowing what to produce while minimizing spoilage, automating dispatch, etc are all integral parts of omni-channel operations. For those looking to offer online delivery in a more meaningful way, feel free to reach out to me at Shizu@jrink.com and stay tuned for the debut of an omni-channel app coming soon! Note: This How to Write a Juice Business Plan PDF is a step-by-step guide to helping you write a business plan for your juice business. Download it for free!
Selling Juice Through Multiple Distribution Channels – Shizu Okusa at JuiceCon (video)
Shizu came from venture capital and began focusing on health and wellness, starting JRINK juicery and later Apothekary. Her companies sell through multiple distribution channels including retail, ecommerce, and wholesale. At JuiceCon 2018 she walked us through how she manages her omni-channel businesses.
Scaling a Beverage Business Speech - Daina Trout at JuiceCon (video)
Daina and her husband Justin started a small kombucha company out of their home, and a few years later have grown it to be a nationally recognized brand with their product being sold in over 12,000 stores nation-wide. Daina told the Health-Ade story at JuiceCon 2018, and took us through her company’s growth and what to expect as a beverage company while growing so quickly.
Thirty Years of Juice Speech – Jimmy Rosenberg at JuiceCon (video)
Jimmy has been in the industry since before it was cool. He is a serial juice entrepreneur and has successfully built two juice brands (Naked, Evolution Fresh) that have been acquired by national food and beverage companies. Hear about the history of juice and Jimmy’s vision for where it’s going.