How much will consumers pay for healthy-in-a-bottle?
As much as $10 and sometimes more. At least that's the belief of high-end grocers like Whole Foods and a spurt of small juice companies trying to move the cold-pressed-juice craze from small-batch to mass-produced.
A
16-ounce bottle of BluePrint Red, containing beets, carrots and ginger,
among other ingredients, goes for $10 at some retailers. And Whole
Foods customers are paying $9 for a bottle of celery-based Twelve
Essentials vegetable juice, one of the top-sellers from Suja, an
18-month-old juice brand based in San Diego. Suja co-founder Annie
Lawless says customers understand the high cost of what goes into the
bottle, including organic produce that is cold pressed and then
preserved using a process that leaves most of the nutrients intact.
"When you buy a bottle, you're getting all the goodness without any of
the effort," says Ms. Lawless, a 26-year-old former law student and yoga
instructor. The company says it generated $20 million in revenue in its
first year.
Just as carrying a Starbucks coffee cup has become a celebrity fashion accessory and a
slung-over-the-shoulder yoga mat can signify a certain devotion to
spiritual fitness, porting a clear bottle of green vegetable juice has
evolved into a status symbol. Initially, the juicing market was
supported mostly by people doing liquid-only cleanses, marketed as a way
to rid the body of toxins and bloat. Now, more consumers are drinking
juice as a meal replacement, a quick infusion of vegetables or to convey
the impression of superior health and discipline.
Suja's product line is a slate of
fruit-and-vegetable juices meant to dose the body with a palatable
concentration of nutrients from organic produce. For people doing a
liquid-only cleanse, Suja sells packages on its website. A three-day
supply costs $225, including shipping on ice outside of California. It
has flavors such as Glow, which contains apples, cucumbers, mint, kale
and other ingredients, and Green Supreme, with apples, kale and lemon.
Health
experts say the vegetable drinks have many beneficial nutrients,
although some ingredients, like apples and carrots, can add a lot of
sugar. Consumers should be careful to get enough fiber in their diets,
since the process of cold-pressed juicing extracts the juice from the
fiber-rich leaves and stems. Good sources of fiber can include whole
grains and nuts, which aid digestive health.
A
simpler route to a well-rounded diet might be to eat the vegetables
themselves, rather than as juice, suggests Marion Nestle, a professor of
nutrition, food studies and public health at New York University. "It's
a lot of money, why not have a salad?"
Juice
companies say the high cost of the organic produce, and the expense of
processing, prevent them from selling their product for less. Consumers
making their own juice at home with similar ingredients would pay about
the same or more, not counting the cost of equipment, they say. "We wish
we could bring the cost down," says Zoë Sakoutis, co-founder of
BluePrint.
Sarah Andersen, 31, drinks about five
bottles of Suja juice a week and says it leaves her feeling healthy and
confident. A health-and-wellness trainer for teenage girls in Madison,
N.J., Ms. Andersen says she used to make her own juice. But the time,
effort and mess became onerous. Now she buys Suja, even if it means
cutting back elsewhere. "I know it's expensive but I would rather have a
juice than get my nails done."
Industry
experts say overall sales of cold-pressed juice aren't tracked
separately. But the segment is a bright spot in an otherwise stagnant
juice market, they say. National retailers like Whole Foods are devoting
increased shelf space to the products, more companies are launching,
and acquisitions and expansion in the industry have been robust, says
Jonas Feliciano, a beverages analyst for Euromonitor International, a
market-research company. "Americans are drinking less juice," he says.
"So what manufacturers are going for is attracting the health-conscious
consumer who will pay higher costs for smaller volumes."
Errol
Schweizer, executive global grocery coordinator for Whole Foods, says
the company was skeptical at first that consumers would be willing to
pay such high prices for juice. But, he says, "I have been surprised by
the cleansing products and what people are willing to spend."
Still,
Whole Foods is hedging its bets. Mr. Schweizer says he called on Suja
to work with Whole Foods' product team to create a secondary line of
less expensive juices and smoothies. The line, called Suja Elements, was
launched in Whole Foods stores around the country this fall and retails
for $5. The bottles are smaller—12 ounces versus the usual 16
ounces—and the recipes tend to use lower-cost ingredients like apples
and carrots.
BluePrint was founded six
years ago to sell a six-bottle-a-day-cleanse product that costs $75 a
day. It includes a lemon, cayenne and agave concoction meant to
"hydrate, refresh, curb that 4 p.m. snack craving and stay focused," the
company website says. BluePrint now also sells individual bottles of
juice at high-end grocers around the country. Another cleanse product:
BluePrintBride, for women wanting to lose weight and detoxify before
their wedding, starts at $350. BluePrint, which was acquired last year
by Hain Celestial Group Inc., in Melville, N.Y., says it had $20 million
in sales last year.
Another
cold-pressed juice company, Evolution Fresh, was purchased by
Seattle-based Starbucks Coffee Co. two years ago for $30 million. The
company recently invested $70 million to open a factory in Southern
California to produce 140,000 gallons of juice a week, says Chris
Bruzzo, general manager of Evolution Fresh. Mr. Bruzzo says the juices
are now carried in 5,000 Starbucks locations and 3,000 grocery outlets.
The best sellers are two varieties of green juice, he says.
Getting
pricey cold-pressed juice on the shelves of national supermarkets and
specialty stores has been a challenge. Stores like Whole Foods typically
require a shelf-life of about 30 days for packaged juices. But
traditional methods of preserving foods use heat, which destroys some
nutrients. Cold-pressed juice companies didn't want that.
To
extend shelf life, some companies, including Suja, BluePrint and
Evolution Fresh, have turned to a process often called high-pressure
processing (HPP), which inactivates most microorganisms while retaining
natural freshness. HPP, also used to preserve guacamole and ready-to-eat
meats, subjects the food to intense pressure of thousands of pounds a
square inch.
High-pressure processing,
however, is the subject of a lawsuit filed against Hain Celestial in
U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York last month.
The suit says that HPP destroys some probiotics and enzymes and that
BluePrint labels falsely advertise its products as "raw." A BluePrint
spokeswoman declined to comment on the suit.
Ms.
Lawless, the Suja co-founder, has long made juice at home because she
has celiac disease. She and a partner, Eric Ethans, in 2011 began
selling juice to her yoga students who would ask about her juicing.
The
small operation attracted two investors, including Jeff Church, 52, a
bottled-water entrepreneur. He approached Whole Foods, which began
offering Suja products in its stores in fall of 2012. Suja—a word the
company founders made up that signifies to them "long and beautiful
life," a spokeswoman says—now produces on average 10,000 bottles a week
of each of its 19 flavors at its Southern California plant. It acquired
an organic-produce distributor to ease supply issues. And it plans to
open a plant in the Philadelphia area next year to have quicker access
to more markets. "It's about getting the kale picked and on the shelf at
Whole Foods as fast as we possibly can," says Mr. Church, Suja's chief
executive.
Just as a few survivors of the early craft beer boom – the Stones,
the Sierras, the Sams – were able to clear the field for a new
generation of brewers, so too is a new group of soda makers popping back
up into view, either incorporating the natural sweetener Stevia or else
recombining other product types like tea or lemonade into their
branding. Like that new crop of craft brewers following Lagunitas or New
Belgium into the breach, the new soda makers can learn the lessons of
the ones who came before.
