Promises

It is my belief that a juice bar should be hysterically funny and yet the team should know almost everything about the universe at the same time. Our guests expect that.

In a city like New York there should be hundreds of juice bars that serve the freshest, cleanest plant-based foods. There also should be scores of yoga studios teaching people how to move their body and how to relax their minds, but for many reasons there are not.

My theory of why there aren’t more great health brands is because great taste is 100% reliant on purity and freshness. Running this type of business is extremely complex. The risks are too great. When more operators see what and how to do this, more great place will emerge and remain.

In a city like New York the highest standards are required to survive, especially in the food and beverage industry.

Just like yoga businesses, in our type of food and beverage category, you have to make knowledge accessible to people. People have questions about their health and they need answers in order to embrace the lifestyle and get out of the fad-diet rut. Also quality at this level of health and wellness has to be consistent and the price points reasonable.

Promises

1. Help people through humorous marketing and informative writing to better understand what to eat and correct healthy lifestyle options.

2. Hold ourselves accountable to the highest possible standards. This begins with using only organic produce and ingredients. One of the tenants of our food philosophy is to eliminate processed foods which means we can’t serve processed foods. None of our ingredients are processed or refined.

3. Make everything from scratch. We don't use any pasteurized juices, we don’t use pasteurized salad dressings, we don’t make soups from powder to serve instantly, we don’t use boxed vegan plant milks, such as oat milk or almond milk, etc. These are all substandard ingredients and they taste horrible.

4. Serve only the freshest product.

5. Offer the best service.

6. Keep our retail prices as low as possible.

7. Do not lie or be hypocritical. We won't advertise ‘organics’ and use conventional. We will not advertise ‘no processed ingredients’ and serve processed ingredients.

8. No Single Use Plastic Packaging. We’re going out on a limb here by eliminating all the plastic packaging from our retail system. It adds up to millions of pieces of plastic over time that make their way back into the environment and our bodies. We simply have to stop enabling the problem.

9. Run a tight ship. Batten down the hatches, swab the decks and raise the sails. Do all of this every day - without fail - or go down with the ship.

10. Have a great music play list.

With the goodsugar™ retail project I am continuing on with what I set out to do at Juice Press. Only now I intend to keep the number of stores down to two or three rather than 84.

Freshness, quality, good service and a great guest experience are the enemies of profit. So be creative to expand and maximize profits. Run a tight operation. Plan, plan, plan.

Businesses like ours need to remain in the control of their capable founders with the help of friendlt investors, family and close friends.