by Renee Strobel, Deli Manager—West
You may have noticed some changes going on with the juice you find on the shelves in the Willy Street Co-op Delis. Previously, the Juice Bar at each of our stores made their own juice (using primarily organic ingredients), bottled it, and put it out on the shelf. This became increasingly difficult, and due to staffing issues, we ended up with a lot of those products out of stock regularly. That didn’t stand up to our expectations or our Owners’. Starting in June we began centralizing our juice production to our West location in Middleton. This change allowed us to fulfill our Owners’ needs and keep juice stocked on all of our stores’ shelves. Now, we’ve made another change to cold-pressing most of that juice!
What Had We Been Doing Before?
Previously, we had been using a centrifugal juicer. The centrifuge method pushes the fruits and vegetables down into a spinning blade and uses centrifugal force to spin the juice out one way and the pulp out another. If you ever stopped by and picked up any of our juice before, it had almost all been made using this method.
The exceptions to this method have always been orange juice and wheatgrass. To make orange juice we use a citrus juicer, which works a lot like any handheld model you’ve used at home. The oranges are crushed, and the skin and pulp pushed out of the machine. For wheatgrass we use a masticating juicer, which grinds the blades of wheatgrass to extract the juice. We will still use these methods to make orange juice and the wheatgrass that goes into our drinks. These methods are the best process for these particular ingredients, and get the best taste out of each.
The centrifuge method worked very well for us for many years, but it was labor intensive. As we centralized our juicing, we began to wonder if there was a more effective way to go about it. It turned out, there was!
Cold-press juicing was quickly brought to our attention as an alternative. Cold-press juice is made using a hydraulically pressurized compression system. The produce is shredded into a large bag and then pressed between two plates, with the juice dripping into a collection tray below.
There’s an efficiency that we were able to gain by using the cold-press juicer. We can juice larger quantities of produce at once, and generally get more juice out of the fruits and vegetables that we are using. While using a centrifuge juicer, a staff member has to stand and put each piece of celery into the juicer, and push it down. With the cold-press machine, we can put bunches of celery in at one time, and allow the machine to do the rest.
As you can imagine, making juice for all three of our stores was a significant undertaking! Our Owners love our juice, and we are really excited to find a way that we can deliver what you as Owners wanted from us, which was more juice!
More Nutrients
As happy as we were to find the efficiency in a new process, that isn’t even the most exciting part of cold-press juicing! When using a centrifuge juicer, all of that spinning creates heat, which damages some of the good stuff in the juice that we know you want. With cold-press, there is no extra heat created! Because this process happens without any heat involved, many of the vitamins, minerals, and natural enzymes of the produce remain intact throughout the juicing process. This means that each bottle of juice contains all of those amazing, healthy nutrients that previously had been heated and destroyed!
New Texture
Additionally, you will also notice a difference in the texture of the juice. With cold-press juicing, there is much less (almost no) pulp and sediment left behind during the juicing process, due to less damage being done to the structure of the produce. This makes for a much smoother juice at the end of the process. There is less foam, less separation between ingredients, and overall a much cleaner finish to the juices when using a cold-press machine. We are thrilled to find that not only can we make more juice for you, but that it will be even better tasting and better for you than what we could make before!
We can also juice types of fruits and vegetables that we couldn’t very easily do before. We can even roll a whole watermelon into the cold-press to make watermelon juice! This gives us the opportunity to expand and change our offerings.
Organic and Local
In our Willy Street Co-op Juice Bars, we have always prided ourselves on the quality of the produce we use to make juice. We always use organic produce in all of our juice. We also try to use locally grown produce as often as possible. With the abilities that the cold-press juicer provides us, we can more easily tap into those local resources, and create new, seasonal recipes that we know that you’re going to love! We are really excited to start creating these new recipes in the spring, confident that each one is going to be nutritious and delicious.
All in all, the change to cold-press juicing for most of our ingredients allows us to fulfill our promises to you, our Owners. We are able to reliably stock all of our fresh juices in all of our stores, with the added nutritional benefits of juices made with mostly cold-pressed and 100% organic ingredients. Add in the amazing taste, the flexibility of recipes that the cold-press allows us, and the ability to support our local farmers even more, and we believe we have a winning combination. We are really excited to have you try our juice with these newly added benefits, and we are confident that you are going to love it just as much as we do!