Three years ago, I was seized with the desire to juice. Juice is healthy and delicious. I believed that juicing would allow me to take in precious vitamins and minerals without the hassle of eating veggies all day. In reality, juicing is hard, tedious work. While it's amusingly noisy, using a juicer imposes the drudgery of cleaning that juicer. After two close encounters with bits of trapped pulp, away my juicer went to the Salvation Army. Hopefully, a more intrepid soul now has it and loves it.
But what if someone else did my juicing for me? Make that two people: husband and wife Jody Polishchuk and Willow Meili, Riley Park residents and owners of The Juice Box, a Vancouver-based company that puts organic, cold-pressed juices into glass bottles that they bring right to your door.
I met with Polishchuk to learn more about the Juice Box and the wonders of juice. A long-time personal juicer and lover of juice, Polishchuk spent time visiting New York in 2011 and was struck by the number of cold-pressed juice shops there.
"There was fresh juice everywhere!" he recalls. Everyone in New York, it seemed, was into juice.
The Juice Box launched in February 2013, chiefly as a home delivery service. Customers make their online orders, which are juiced in the morning and delivered to the customer's door later that day.
Polishchuk doesn't see his juice as your average beverage.
"Food is medicine," he says. "We are offering this tool as a resource to people to boost their health and wellness. Juicing used to be a fringe thing, something health nuts were into or something you would see on late night TV, but now it's proliferated into an uber trend."
As an added feature, Polishchuk and Meili work with naturopaths, nutritionists and a network of professionals to provide "cleanse support" for people on juice fasts. Their juice recipes are developed in consultation with Keyrsten McEwan, resident nutritionist with Integrated Healing Arts, one of Vancouver's longest-running naturopathic clinics.
To that end, the Juice Box offers a one-day juice cleanse, which includes six to eight bottles of juice. Clients tend to cleanse for three days, although clients have gone on 12-day programs. Customers have the ability to order à la carte and customize their order to reflect their current juicing needs.
The juice isn't cheap. It's about $8 a bottle, which includes a bottle deposit. Clients can buy subscriptions to bring down the price, which, compared to other organic cold pressed juices, are competitive.
My taster package of juice represented one-day of a cleanse. I did not do the cleanse as such, inviting my family to sample the fresh-pressed wonders.
The Turmeric Tonic was my favourite, al-though not for the faint of heart. It's a bitter but strangely compelling extraction of lemons, ginger and honey. The Heart Beet - a sweet and earthy beet drink - and the orange cucumber were well tolerated by my family, albeit the carrot was the only one my 13-year-old son sought for refills. The Light Green is a fresh cucumber lemon, and the Deep Green with lemon is an astonishingly powerful explosion of vegetation; my husband liked this one best.
For more information, go to thejuicebox. ca, where you can order online or find a list of retail locations. twitter.com/willow72
