How to Start a Fresh Juice Business (That’s Successful)

Starting any small business is extremely difficult, long hours, multitude of expenses, and the always-looming pressure to keep the business afloat. Starting a juice bar or business brings its own complexities, extremely perishable products, food safety, seasonality, and a host of other challenges, by now you’re aware it will be a difficult road. That being said we want to help you in your juice endeavor by providing practical advice for ensuring your business has the best opportunity to launch, survive, and thrive! Below are 6 insights to consider when opening a juice business:

1. Ensure Your Product (Juice Recipes) are Great:

The number one problem that I’ve see when small businesses open is the lack of demand for their product, the doors are open, the signs are washed, the counters are brimming with colorful fruits & vegetables, but the shop is a ghost town. In order to increase your chances for success, demand for a business should be built before your storefront or business opens. Even if juices and smoothies are trendy in your town, that won’t necessarily mean you have enough customers to keep the lights on 6 months down the road. How does the Field of Dreams quote go, “if you build it they will come”? To carry on with that analogy, Kevin Costner built a great field, like him, if you want customers to make the journey to your shop and spend their hard earned money you need to have an excellent product, make great juice.

While good juice recipes will assist in your efforts, the only thing better than taking educated guesses at what customers actually enjoy is getting customer feedback on your product. Before opening your doors make sure people LOVE your products, not just like, but actually have (positive) emotional responses to it! This is the only way you can be sure customers will make the effort to come buy them when you’re charging for it. Three great places to test your products beforehand are at local sports fields, farmers markets, and business parks.

2. Partner with Key Businesses

One of the most untapped resources when it comes to opening up a small business is an entrepreneur’s ability to have deep insight into its customer’s interests. Spending time doing deep market research can help you expedite the learning process and allow you to get ahead of competitors and ensure you gain the needed eye balls when you open your doors. For example, as a juice business, there are many avid fruit and vegetables juice drinkers in two popular and growing subcultures; Crossfit & Yoga. We have pulled data from Google Trends to give you insight into their growth in comparison to the most popular gym chains in the nation:

 

By developing strategic partnerships with subcultures like the two above it will allow you to tap into popular and growing networks potentially catapulting your growth. If you are needing help finding local Crossfit gyms we’ve provided the Crossfit gym locator for you to use, just click on the picture:

 

A bonus tip: With Yoga studios often promoting cleanses to their attendees this is a great place to initially market your products and develop strong mutually beneficial business relationships.

3. Low Overhead is Key

The biggest temptation for first time juice shop owners is to get the prime location, put the shop on Main Street with the best location and the most expensive rent. It is tempting to be on the hottest street corner and maybe even getting that location may be quite lucrative, but the reality is, main street locations should always be proven viable businesses.

4. Getting Wholesale Products

Before opening up your juice business ensure that your margins are going to be strong enough to pay the bills and walk away with cold hard cash. Having worked in a failed juice/smoothie shop, I witnessed first hand how failure to buy wholesale products can drain a small business owners margins. Ensure that adequate time is spent proactively establishing key wholesale relationships before opening up your doors, if you are lucky enough to be living on the west coast and more specifically California, there are plenty of options for Organic fruit and produce suppliers; below are great options:

 

Providing Wholesale Fruits & Veggies across California:

Earls Organic Grower Map
Large Directory of Wholesale Produce Suppliers

 

The next product line that you want to ensure you’re buying wholesale plastic bottles and cups. We provide a full line of wholesale plastic supplies for keeping your juice bar or business fully stocked.

5. Develop Seasonal Cleanses

Creating recurring customers and developing your business as a habit can be the most beneficial way to build a lasting and a strong community with your customers, one of the easiest ways to do this is with seasonal cleanses. Seasonal cleanses while growing in popularity are a gold mine for getting repeat customers, typically the best way to do this is setup a 10-15 juice cleanse that is done over two weeks. You provide better pricing for the customers once they buy the cleanse package, allowing them to come in on a regular basis and giving you the insight to know what volume of product to keep in stock, helping relieve one of the biggest challenges you will have as a business owner, product stocking.

Our hope is that you can walk away from this article with tangible tactics for ensuring a strong foundation and valuable insights as you launch your new juice business.

 

Bonus:

Here are a few juice recipes from around the web that seem to be popular, a good start to building that great menu:

Green Juice with Meyer Lemon Twist

Excellent Green Juice with Avocado

 

Popular Bottles for Juices

• 16 ounce
• 12 ounce
• 8 ounce
• 32 ounce