Berman Zach - The Juice Truck: a guide to juicing, smoothies, cleanses and living a plant based lifestyle

Copyright 2017 Zach Berman and Ryan Slater

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ISBN9780147530011

Ebook ISBN9780147530028

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Book creative direction by Glasfurd & Walker Design

Photography provided by Anita Cheung, Tigh Farley, Alison Page, Juno Kim, Jason Scott, Brian Van Wyk, Jeremy Jude Lee, Abdallah El Chami, Thompson Chan, and Sophia Hsin.

Published in Canada by Appetite by Random House, a division of Penguin Random House Canada Limited.

www.penguinrandomhouse.ca

v4.1

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This book is dedicated to Eden Elizabeth, her life, the amazing message she shared, and her spirit that inspired so many in her short time on this earth.

CONTENTS

THE JUICE ON JUICING

Travel does many things to you. Committing to the open path, to the adventure of the unknown, liberates your mind and opens up possibilities and opportunities to go anywhere. Our travels took us to the Himalayas and Nepal, and that is where our journey into the juicing world began.

My childhood friend Ryan Slater and I had both recently graduated from university. After five years of studying urban planning and visual art, where we planned future cities and dreamed up nature scenes, we were hungry for adventure. We decided to save up and take off to Nepal, a dream destination bursting with mysticism, magic, and mountains.

In the fall of 2009, we were on the yak trail, ready for Himalayan peaks and thrills. Early into our first trek, we got snowed in at a small mountain town called Manang, on our way around the Annapurna circuit. As we waited for the storm to pass, we noticed the locals drinking a vibrant orange drink. We learned that this drink was made from sea-buckthorn berries. The sea-buckthorn produces a small, tart berry. It grows at high altitudes and has a unique capacity to withstand adverse conditions. Its berry, packed with essential omegas, iron, potassium, calcium, and vitamins, gave the isolated local community nutrients their otherwise starchy potato- and rice-based diet lacked.

From that moment on, our trip revolved around seeking out the local health secrets and remedies. Sea-buckthorn and shilajit in Nepal; moringa leaf powder, ashwagandha and turmeric in India; and the best king coconuts weve ever tasted in Sri Lanka. We even met a guy in New Delhi who was somehow able to juice bananas (were still not sure how that works). Every day, we would frequent the local juice stand in whatever city we found ourselves exploring. Over and over again, these street communities of juicers greeted us juice-obsessed foreigners with eager smiles and insanely delicious locally made juices.

We arrived back in Vancouver, British Columbia, in the fall of 2010 with juice fresh on our minds. Since we had probably numbed our response to fear by going on dangerous Himalayan hikes, rafting down glacier rivers, and riding motorcycles throughout the bustling roads of India, the idea of starting a business didnt seem the least bit scary. We like to say we brought a nice combination of navet and positivity into launching our business.

We spent the next six months researching, blending, and pressing everything possible in my parents kitchen. Our experimentation yielded recipes that worked and recipes that definitely did not work. We stubbornly tried for weeks to come up with a great durian recipe, but never quite got there. (Anyone whos tried this popular but foul-smelling South Asian fruit will understand the challenge.) We brought in focus groupsexercise fanatics to less active people, young to old, male and femaleto learn what recipes to launch with. All the while, we were trying to learn how to cold-press juice fresh to order, something no other cold-pressed juice bar had done at the time (we are still one of the only juice bars in the world to offer this). Once we figured out the menu, our next mountain to climb was financing. We quickly learned that enthusiasm wasnt enough. Back to Zachs parents place, this time with piles of scrap paper and blue-sky ideas, to figure out the costing and the logistics of sustaining a business. About ten months had passed from when we decided to enter the juicing world full-time, at the age of twenty-four, with a shoestring backpackers budget. We were ready to go.