Tonia and Natalie, The Juice Ladies
By Tonia and Natalie, Juice Ladies, Local Food For Everyone
Friday, January 2nd, 2015 9:00 AM CST
I can’t believe how a 2 hour long documentary completely changed my life. It started as a juice fast, honestly to lose weight mainly, but also because after I watched Fat, Sick and Nearly Dead I realized that I just felt BAD. I was tired, I was grouchy, and I was ready for a change. Now, after completing a 50-day fast I had more energy than I ever remember having and I couldn’t stop talking about JUICE!
All my talking finally persuaded Tonia to try some juicing as well. Tonia was my assistant manager at Barnes & Noble. I was the store manager and she was my right hand woman. Tonia has always been into healthy living and exercise, so at first she thought my juicing plan was a fad, but then she starting seeing real results and excitement from me where before there was none. She couldn’t help but join in on the fun. I held an informal juicing seminar at my house and Tonia attended. From then on, Tonia and I were a juice team.
We started holding seminars at Barnes & Noble and soon we realized that people didn’t just want information about juice, they wanted JUICE. And so we had to figure out how to give our customers what they wanted. This required several visits to the health department to figure out if what we wanted to do was even possible in Bowling Green. Luckily, we had a great mentor in Patrick Davis who was supportive and found the answers to all of our questions and is even a customer now!
The next big project was designing and building our commercial kitchen and researching the equipment needed to produce enough juice to take over the world. The small home juicers we were using were just not going to cut it. So, while my husband Paul worked on the building and the permits and the design, Tonia and I worked on drumming up business and creating unusual juices with unusual names. And our friend Mary Jo Johnson was feverishly designing our logo, business cards, juice names, website and all things printable.
We sold to family and friends and had a few regular customers that had to pick up their juice from my house in mason jars. This was a slow process. Every week we would go to farmer’s markets and grocery stores to purchase all our produce for the week, then we would load it all in our kitchen and bring over the Norwalk Juicer. At that point we were ready to begin the weekly ritual knows as JUICEFEST!
THE JUICE
Local Apples.
Soon enough, we had more customers than we did juice. We just couldn’t make it fast enough. So, after our kitchen was complete and certified, we invested in the Goodnature juicer, affectionately referred to as Gordy. He could pump out some serious cold pressed juice in a very short amount of time and it was the most delicious juice we had ever tasted. JUICEFEST was now a pretty quick process! We started working on label design for bottles and tote bags and all the things that you never think of when you decide to start a business (at least we didn’t.)
Then, and most importantly, we found a home for our juice. The Community Farmer’s Market is where we felt most comfortable. It became a family to us quickly and has been invaluable in so many ways. We also purchased a 1969 Scotty Serro camper (Clementine) to use as a mobile unit. After renovating and making it juiceworthy, we traveled to different farmer’s markets and craft shows to sell our juice.
This first year has taught us so many things, and so many lessons have been learned the hard way, but most important to us is maintaining our mission to supply the most nutritious juice using as many local products as possible.
Please visit our website at www.zestjuiceforlife.com to learn more about our juice varieties!
The mobile unit, Clementine!
