'Green' juices mean more profit, less waste
Tuesday, December 8, 2015
These new-look health drinks are getting a favourable press in Europe, bringing pioneering farmers a welcome new market and a much better return from otherwise sub-standard crops
by NORMAN DUNN
Only this August, Germany's biggest tabloid Bild, a sheet that usually devotes most of its space to the wilder antics of politicians and film or TV stars, dedicated a double-page spread to the advantages of vegetable juice in the human diet.
The health attributes of pure juices from beetroot, horseradish, kale, carrots, fennel and, yes, even garlic are attracting so much favourable attention that new recipe books have been launched in at least a dozen European languages over the last six months alone. Nutritionists swear by the detoxification advantages of a week drinking only vegetable (and fruit) juices. Diet experts say it's a sure-fire way of losing weight safely.
The so-called green juice is also great for squeezing more profit out of every acre. We all know that spinach or lettuce growers need just a single hail shower and their field crop is useless for supermarket sales. Plowing down the crop was the only answer before. Now, though, there's a whole new market opening up. Some have even started retailing vegetable juice straight from their yard.
For instance "B-fresh" is a juice line started by salad, spinach and root vegetable grower Philip Maddocks in Shropshire, England. He's got eight different vegetable/fruit juice blends on the market now, selling conventionally or online straight from his farm's C$4 million cold press and bottling plant, which uses only juice from fresh vegetables from his own fields – no bought-in pureed material.
Maddocks recalls that his enterprise started with a hail-damaged field of spinach. It struck him that all this damaged leaf could still earn top dollar if processed and marketed as fresh, cold-pressed, locally-grown juice. Output is presently a modest 3,000 bottles per week, so fresh vegetables are still very much the main enterprise on this farm. But marketing in 6x250 millilitre packs for the equivalent of $30 means there's a real margin to work with.
Possible retail prices for such fashionable drinks also have plenty of scope. Online research finds that attractively bottled vegetable juice blends in Britain sell for as much as C$100 per six-pack. It's a business that also appeals to society's increasing concern about food waste. There's no shortage of stories about crop that is dumped instead of being marketed because it just doesn't meet supermarket standards. Juicing offers a way out of this situation and helps avoid sometimes spectacular grower losses. For instance, carrots that make grade A for retailing in Britain this autumn are bringing farmers around the equivalent of $1,600 per ton. Carrots rejected simply because they are misshapen or the wrong size sell as feed for just $20 per ton ex-farm.
European pioneers in crops aimed exclusively at the vegetable juice market are thought to be farmers belonging to the Swiss Tägerwilen Vegetable Growers Group which, 58 years ago, got together to sell fresh, cold-pressed carrot juice from organically grown crops (no chemical fertilizers or plant protection sprays). By last year, the same group, now marketing a wide range of home-grown vegetable and fruit juices under the Biotta label, had 70 staff in its bottling plant.
The Tägerwilen farmers report continuous expansion with, currently, 30 different drink blends now being shipped to 40 countries worldwide. Despite this marketing growth, the organization stays relatively small, with all juice crops harvested within a 20-kilometre radius of the plant.
Back in Britain, Philip Maddocks keeps nutrients in his farm-filled vegetable drinks at their naturally high levels by avoiding conventional pasteurization and using cold High Pressure Processing technology (HPP), a technique that claims to do the same job as pasteurization but kills all pathogens through pressure (up to 6,000 bar!) instead of destroying vitamins as well by high temperature treatment. Nowadays one of the biggest vegetable juicers in the Netherlands also uses the technology and a growing number of small-scale as well as large organizations in this booming sector buy-in HPP-treated vegetable juices for their particular blends and cocktails.
Even if the new trend only served to avoid the huge waste in farm vegetable production by fully utilizing damaged or non-standard sizes of leaves, roots and tubers, it would be more than welcome. But the fact that it is behind an attractive range of drinks with very high nutrient levels and very low sugars means the new, cold-pressed HPP vegetable drinks are welcomed by the medical profession as well as trendsetters everywhere. BF
Norman Dunn writes about European agriculture from Germany.