Raw Food: The Market Said Yes, But Our Fundamentals Said No

What if you had an exciting new business idea that applied disruptive new technology to a fast-growing consumer food market?

What if you branded, packaged and tested your new product with a sampling of highly-influential customers in your target market, and the response was passionately enthusiastic?

Nine out of ten entrepreneurs would run with an opportunity like that, right? But at Balassanian Enterprises (BE) — we’re a venture lab developing multiple new consumer businesses that combine the digital and physical worlds in unique ways — we decided to say no.

Instead, we’re going to let someone else run with our business to a market touchdown.

To understand why we made that decision, you need to know the concept behind our business. And that was to create a national brand of nutritionally-optimized, cold-pressed juices and meals that were customized to order and delivered daily, on demand, to the fast-growing market of raw foods and wellness consumers.

The juices would be 100 percent uncooked and unprocessed, vegan, organic, and dairy-free, with the ingredients individually-tailored to each individual’s nutritional and physiological goals. Protein count, enzyme count, vitamin count — all would be tabulated and formulated into an appetizing product that met each individual customer’s needs.

We branded our new venture Be.Raw. Our slogan was “Feel Alive.”

INVENTING A STAR TREK REPLICATOR

The first problem we overcame in developing our Be.Raw business was technological. Existing juicers simply weren’t up to the task of creating customized raw foods juices that tasted good enough and stayed fresh on the shelves long enough to be a viable consumer product.

In a typical centrifugal juicer, for example, a high-speed blade eviscerates the raw food, mashes it up, and then spins it all so that the pulp gets spread across a mesh on the outside of the container and the juice flows through it. The problem with this system is that it aerates the juice. And when you oxygenate juices, you dramatically reduce their shelf life. You go from a product that could sit on a store shelf for several days to one that will spoil within a few hours.

With a cold-pressed juicer, on the other hand, we could create a product with a three-day shelf life, which would work as a mass-market delivery model. But one of the problems with it was that it was insanely labor intensive and produced only one-quarter the amount of juice you could get from a centrifugal juicer in the same amount of time. Without the benefit of economies of scale, our cost would be close to $10 per juice just to create it, including all the time spent prepping the material and cleaning the equipment afterwards.

There was also a problem common to both types of juicers: each operates by eviscerating and juicing the various ingredients at the same time. You put in the kale, the apple, the spinach, the spirulina, the cucumber, and the dandelions, and then grind it all up to get the juice out. Unfortunately, this results in a product with a very inconsistent taste because the same weights of the various raw food ingredients will yield different amounts of juice and different tastes, depending on the season and ripeness of each ingredient.

Vegetarian, Raw and Vegan with Bill & Sheila
_____________________________________________________________________
If you require a high quality printout of this article, just click on the printer symbol next to ’Share and enjoy’, and we will do the rest. This site is hosted by (click on the graphic for more information)

Return from raw to Home Page

If you want to increase your site popularity and gain thousands of visitors – check out these sites THEY ARE FREE. Spanishchef more than doubled its ‘New Visitors’ last month simply by signing up to these sites:




Follow spanishchef.net on TWITTER