January 2, 2009

Liquiteria

A certain Juice Guy turned me onto Liquiteria on my last trip to NYC. Now my mind is racing with new juice ideas. Those of you who have been following might have remembered a few older posts where I dropped hints of my big plans for juice. One of my killer recipes is carrot kumquat. Another involves granny smith apples, lime juice, and beets.

I’m more committed than ever to juice as a core offering at Clover. The drink I had at Liquiteria was called “the killer xx.” And I just loved the cayenne in the drink. Now all of the sudden I’m thinking of subtle herb and spice-powered concoctions. This is going to be fantastic.

The other thing I liked was the packaging. My friend had called this out as one of his favorite things about the place. Real fresh juices, just made, but “grab-able.” Now I’m finding myself thinking about Fresh Samantha’s early days. Their juices were non-pasteurized, less than 2 days old, and just amazing. Then they started pasteurizing, then they were bought by Odwalla, then Coke bought Odwalla, and now you have a sort of syrupy, not entirely satisfying drink in the cooler.

We’re going to have some advantages Fresh Samantha (or Naked, or Odwalla) never had: (1) we control our distribution, no drinks that are old will ever be sold, (2) we don’t have to run expensive delivery trucks all over the place. We’ll make the drinks throughout the day, on site, but package them so you don’t have to wait. It’s going to be a juice revolution.

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