Garden of Flavor Finds Its Niche in Exploding Premium Juice Market

Merely a few years ago a 16-ounce bottle of juice on a grocery store shelf with a $9 price tag would have seemed absurd–who would pay that for juice? Fast-forward a few years more and it’s clear that many people will indeed pay premium prices for products with health benefits, especially for fresh pressed juices with research supported probiotic ingredients.

We’re not talking apple and orange; this new category of premium juice is bringing home-juicing blends to market, with added functional benefits. Blends like green drinks, turmeric coconut water and pineapple goji. The trend is even sending ripples into the traditional juice categories. According to market research firm Packaged Facts, consumption of regular orange juice has over the past five years slid by 3.6 percent, while that of frozen orange juice plummeted by 14.7 percent.

Garden of Flavor: At The Top of the Trend

Raw Food Chef and Certified Holistic Educator, Lisa Marie Reed, has been juicing fruits and veggies for more then 30 years–a lot longer than the recent fresh-pressed juice craze has been trending. In 2011, Reed opened a juice bar in the leafy town of Chagrin Falls, Ohio, with the intent of sharing her unique fruit and veggie juices with health-thirsty Midwesterners. But when a new cold pressed process method that didn’t heat the product, thereby leaving nutrients intact, became available, Reed knew her next step: bring Garden of Flavor juices to store shelves.

Fresh Veggies in a Bottle

Each blend of Garden of Flavor juice is designed with different benefits in mind and flavors that are unique. “Our juices taste good but are also good for you,” Reed says. And good for you is an understatement. Their best selling Mean Green juice has nearly 5 pounds of veggies in each bottle. Another favorite juice, Goji Pineapple, delivers a high antioxidant boost. “Goji berries have four times more antioxidants than blueberries,” Reed says. Garden of Flavor uses only certified organic ingredients–a testament to the company’s dedication to quality. Other blends include Turmeric Tonic with Probiotics, Cucumber Fresh and Appleade with Probiotics. Garden of Flavor also sells a 1-Day Juice Cleanse 6 Pack which amounts to more than 20 pounds of fruits, vegetables, and nuts.

“I had always dreamed of bringing my juices to store shelves,” says Ms. Reed. “Before HPP came along the only way you could pasteurize juice was to heat it; when you heat juice it kills the living enzymes and you aren’t getting a living breathing juice.” she says. “But then HPP came along and provided the closest thing to juicing at home, once I learned about it I said ‘let’s do this, let’s get our products on shelves.’”

Probiotic Edge

Given her training in health and diet, it’s no surprise that Lisa has long been a proponent of probiotics. “We just always figured we had to get our probiotics from yogurt or a pill,” Reed says. “We had never really thought about probiotics in our juices. Then we learned it was possible and we started testing right away, and we saw beautiful living cultures.”

The unique probiotic strain BC30™ (Bacillus coagulans GBI-30, 6086) does what others can’t–it survives extreme manufacturing processes and is shelf stable, making it ideal for a wide variety of uses such as products that are already being consumed from yogurt, oatmeal, muffins and pizza, to instant coffee, tea, milk and even survives the HPP process in juices. BC30’s unique structure safeguards the cell’s genetic material from the temperature extremes and pressures involved in the manufacturing process. It easily incorporates into products, overcomes shelf-life challenges and withstands the challenges it’s exposed to during digestive transit.

Probiotic Payoff

“In a rapidly expanding market, finding a way to differentiate your premium juice is crucial; adding BC30 is doing just that for Garden of Flavor. When we added BC30 to our Appleade, sales increased by 28 percent,” Reed says.

“Working with BC30 was the easiest thing. They came down to our shop and they made everything so easy; it was an instant partnership. We sent out products for testing and got great results. On day one we had 1 billion CFU and on day 30 we had 1 billion CFU. The hardest thing about adding probiotics was printing the labels…”

Serving the Midwest

Currently Garden of Flavor has SKUs on shelves at regional markets including select Whole Foods, Heinen’s, Mustard Seed Markets and Hiller’s. Do they want to be national? Sure, but in time. “Right now we are focusing on the Midwest and Mid-Atlantic,” Reed explains. “We are an Ohio company and right now we want to focus on building the brand and supplying the best juice possible where other juice companies haven’t focused–the Midwest. And, there’s probably nowhere in the country where people appreciate fresh-pressed juices as much as the Midwest,” she says.