Operators of Juice Bars Hope to Match Success Of the Coffee Chains (original) (raw)
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A New Battle For a Nation's Taste Buds
- Feb. 22, 1997
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February 22, 1997
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First, there was frozen yogurt, which was transformed overnight from ice cream's poor cousin into an American snacking staple. Then, there was caffe latte, a treat once reserved for gondolas and exotic outposts and now the morning sustenance of construction workers. Can blue-green algae and Ginkgo biloba be far behind?
The owners of Jamba Juice, a 45-store chain of juice bars serving up fresh and frothy beverage blends -- known in juice-business argot as smoothies -- are convinced that juice may be the hottest new food item since the Starbucks Corporation convinced the world it was a great idea to spend $2 for a cup of coffee. Here, the attraction is not a caffeine jolt, but the supposed healing powers of the mix-ins. (An extract from the leaf of the Ginkgo biloba, a tree common in China and Japan, is thought to strengthen the immune system; blue-green algae is added as a source of vitamin B12.) Nutrition experts dispute most of the health claims made for these ingredients but acknowledge that they are probably harmless.
While there have been a smattering of juice and smoothie bars around the country for decades, juice purveyors, capitalizing on Americans' dueling obsessions with healthy eating and sweets, are rolling out juice bars in a big way.
There are now hundreds of juice bars -- most of them small and on the West Coast -- and new ones pop up almost daily. In California, where the juice bars are most popular, more than 150 companies are now active, up from a handful six years ago, said Linda Renaud, president of Juice Mart, a juice distributor here.
While fruit-juice libations have not caught on in the rest of the United States quite yet, Kirk Perron, Jamba Juice's chairman and chief executive, means to change that. He wants to bring Jamba's Powerberries, Carrot Squeezes and Raspberry Rushes, which sell for about $3 a pop, to 1,000 stores in every region of the country within five years. And to finance that kind of breakneck expansion, he said, he plans to take his company public sometime in the next two years.
Is it a realistic ambition? John McMillin, a food industry analyst at Prudential Securities, thinks so. ''If coffee bars work, why not juice bars?'' Mr. McMillin asked. ''There are four attributes that any consumer is looking for today in food products, and juice bars offer at least three of them: convenience, taste, value and nutrition. While paying $1.50 for a glass of juice may not be a value, healthy snacking is in big time.''
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