Owners of the The Weekly Juicery, Kimmye Bohannon and Elizabeth Beal.Photo by Emily Moseley.
The Weekly Juicery is a timing success story. As both a product and a service, The Weekly Juicery began in the fall of 2011 when Kimmye Bohannon and Elizabeth Beal made healthful vegetable juice for each other a week at a time, delivering it to the other’s home. Working a juicer to extract nutrients from vegetables is messy and time-consuming. Bohannon wondered if making juicing convenient for other people could be a business idea.
“At that time, I did not have a vision,” she said. “I just liked the way drinking juice made me feel.”
Starting with one customer, which quickly grew to five — and then 40 — Bohannon and Beal were business partners within a few weeks, and the Weekly Juicery had a full-fledged home delivery subscription program, mostly in the 40502 zip code. In 11 weeks’ time, the business had 80 customers receiving bottled vegetable juice delivered to their door, hand-pressed in Bohannon’s kitchen the night before. Today The Weekly Juicery has 15 employees on the press team, the retail side and delivery service. In May 2012, The Weekly Juicery opened a storefront near downtown Lexington on Old Vine Street, adding fruit smoothies to the juice bar’s lineup.
In 2013, the business made 65,000 bottles of juice, some of which were taken to two farmers markets in Louisville, where they were met with positive response. “People wanted to have our juice more often than once a week,” Bohannon said, so they started a delivery service in Louisville last October. In April of this year, The Weekly Juicery opened a juice bar in St. Matthews, in a renovated old house. The company is also delivering to juice subscribers in Cincinnati and hopes to have a retail space in the Queen City this summer.
All of the juice pressing is done on site at the Lexington location, and the product is transported to Louisville and Cincinnati. Lexington deliveries are made on Mondays and Thursdays to about 150 weekly subscribers. Cincinnati runs are Tuesdays and Fridays, and Louisville gets home delivery service on Wednesdays and Saturdays.
After hours, the press team takes over the Old Vine retail space and turns it into a manufacturing zone. Produce is cold-pressed by hand, a labor-intensive process of extracting nutrients. Enzymes within the foods stay alive and are not pasteurized, which makes for a bottled juice with a short shelf life of no more than 72 hours.
“We have strict standards to get ingredients refrigerated within one minute when it comes off the press,” Bohannon said.
Bohannon and Beal support local agriculture as much as possible; their business has been a Kentucky Proud member from the beginning.
“I worked with Commissioner Comer and his team,” Bohannon said of James Comer, who leads the Kentucky Department of Agriculture. “He was instrumental in introducing me to local growers.”
The Kentucky Agricultural Development Board also gets a shout-out from Bohannon. “This board reviewed our business plan and gave us a loan/grant to help fuel and expand our operation,” she said.
The Weekly Juicery has local contracts with growers in Berea, Lexington, Louisville, Warsaw and other Kentucky cities for beets, carrots, cucumbers, kale, romaine, collard greens, field greens, wheatgrass, watermelon, blueberries and strawberries.
“All those dollars will stay here,” Bohannon said. She buys from California when produce isn’t available during the Kentucky winters, but the local ag community is working on extending the growing season through high tunnels, a type of greenhouse.
In addition to 16 varieties of juices, the Weekly Juicery has recently added 10 raw foods to the menu.
“We felt customers wanted the next level,” Bohannon said, “making the transition to eating (plant-based) food that’s still alive; food that contains water.”
Made on the premises, The Weekly Juicery’s raw foods are gluten- and dairy-free and vegan. An example is the vegan veggie wrap, a collard green wrapped around carrots, cucumbers and The Weekly Juicery’s own cashew cream.
“Before we put something out, we test it with our customers,” Bohannon said. Samples are offered for willing taste-testers, and then the management team goes through a per-unit costing process to formulate the right price point. One of the early juices, “Green Gracious,” had to be taken off the menu because the company was losing money on its production.
“It took having a dedicated resource to the analytics of our business to say, ‘We have to have thresholds and percentages we adhere to,’” Bohannon said.
In October 2013, a group of investors bought in, giving Bohannon and Beal the capital they needed to expand in Louisville and Cincinnati and invest in custom software for an intricate ordering system that allows weekly customers to manage their accounts from their phones.
“Sometimes I think we could have moved faster,” Bohannon said. But just when she thinks growth is too slow, she’ll have a moment of introspection and realize everything is moving just in time.
“Our manufacturing got stable,” she said. “Had we tried to open in Louisville a year ago, our order system wouldn’t have been in place. We were creating the necessary building blocks to service more markets effectively.”
Expansion is in the works for 2014 and beyond, including a second satellite location in Lexington, which will probably be in the Nicholasville Road area, a storefront in Cincinnati, a second site in Louisville, a central kitchen to handle the juice pressing, and possible juice bars in northern Kentucky, Columbus, Ohio, and Knoxville, Tenn., and/or Chattanooga, Tenn.
“We’re committed to getting this business out there,” Bohannon said. “I hope there’s a Weekly Juicery on many corners in many cities and that everyone drinks juice, not just those that are forward-thinking in trying new things.”