There’s an art to making juice. Like becoming a better cook. It can be a lifelong journey. You can always learn something new. Tweak flavors, make juices healthier or add a new ingredient. There are plenty of things you can think of, from selecting your ingredients through balancing flavors. We spend months developing different recipes for businesses, and that means that a lot of ideas and juices end up in the trash can. To become better at developing recipes, you’ll need to do the same.
Here, we will walk you through the 4 step process of how we develop and test out recipes. It’s a lot of fun and you’ll be amazed how just adding a pinch of salt or pepper can make a huge difference. But before getting to our 4 step process. First I want to talk about developing recipes for business and how it’s different from juice you make at home. I had been making juice at home for several years. I love the taste of them, so did friends and family. But once ready to sell my juices I learned that the recipes are slightly different for businesses. I needed to modify my juices a lot. There are 2 main differences.
Recipes are in Percentages
My recipes looked something like this:
It’s also how you’ll find most recipes online. But how large is the carrot? There different every time! It makes it difficult to get your juices taste the same every time. You also don’t know how much produce you’ll need. It makes it impossible to calculate your food cost. Using recipes based on pieces of fruits or vegetables is not an accurate way to produce juices on a larger scale. For business, we want to create recipes based on percentages. Like this:
Profitability
When juicing at home, I’d never taken into account what a single juice cost. I would buy a couple of bags of veggies and juice as much as I could. But in business, you have to take into account the price of the bottle, the label, every single ingredient and have a margin for your costs and profit. If my ingredients are too expensive, I end up with a $25 juice. So when developing your recipes, you have to take this into account. That’s why a lot of juices that are sold are based on ingredients that are less expensive but have a high yield. Such as cucumber, carrots, and apples.
When you’re spending a lot of work searching for recipes online. Use the following 4 steps to develop recipes your customers are going to love and are juice business approved!
1
Make a List of Ingredients
Search for recipes online, in books, write down the ones that you already have or would like to try out. Make sure that the ingredients are available in your area. We want to include a variety of combinations. The chances are that your recipes aren’t based on percentages. We need to guess how much percentage of each ingredient we are going to use. We have to start somewhere to be able to improve them.
A few ideas to select recipes based on:
Popularity or ingredients commonly used (Example: Carrots + Apple + Lemon)
Profitability, high yield ingredients (Example: Cucumber + Celery + Apple + Lemon)
Unique ingredients (Example: Mint + Parsley + Cucumber)
Benefits, nutrient dense veggies (Example: Spinach + Kale + Spirulina + …)
After you’ve selected the recipes, you want to try out. Make a list of every ingredient and buy them. For ingredients that you want to use a lot buy at least 2 pounds/1kg. For the other ingredients, 0.5 pounds/200 gram can be sufficient.
2
Juice Everything Separately
We’re going to be juicing every ingredient separately. Then bottle the juice and label it accordingly. This is a lot of work, but it’s also a lot of fun! Did you ever taste pure sweet potato juice? Or how about pure lettuce juice? It’s already worth it to me to fulfil that curiosity. I’d wanted to test a lot of different juices so these are my 24 juices: Apple (golden delicious), Apple (Granny Smith), Celery, Fennel, Sweet Potato, Pineapple, Ginger, Lime, Lemon, Cucumber, Lettuce, Kale, Spinach, Red Cabbage, Mint, Bell Pepper, Kurkuma, Almonds, Carrot, Grapefruit, Pumpkin, Orange, Broccoli, Cabbage.
3
Mix The Juices
This is the fun part! We are going to be mixing juices. You are going to need a few things:You’re going to need a kitchen scale and or some way to measure a smaller amount if you have very precise recipes. I’ve used a digital measuring spoon that can measure small amounts of 0.1 gram. We want to measure small quantities because we want to create small samples. Not all of the juices are going to taste great. By making small samples, you haven’t wasted a large glass or bottle. And of course, by doing it this way, you won’t need that much juice.
When mixing juices here are a few guidelines that can help you.
Write down everything
Otherwise, you are going to forgot what you’ve created.
Use ml and grams to measure
100 ml (about 3 oz) is the perfect small amount for a sample tasting. Not too big, not too little. Which means that 100 ml = 100% of your juice. This will keep it simple to formulate your recipes. If you, for example, need 20% of Pineapple. That means you would need 20 ml or 20 grams of juice.
Number The Recipes and Cups
Number your recipes and number the cups with a sharpy or print the numbers on a sticker and place them on the cups. This way we keep track of which recipe is which. We’ve tested out 32 different recipes, so it’s easy to get lost if the cups aren’t numbered.
Mix carefully according to your recipes and put them aside for now. We are going to be testing them once all of your recipes are created.
4
Sample Taste
There isn’t a recipe that’s perfect. And it isn’t about getting it right from the start. The important thing is to create a juice that you like and then let people taste it and learn what you can improve. We’ve taken our sample tasting form, but you can also use a notebook. Write down the number of the juice and If people don’t like how it tastes, change it until they do. Try it yourself a lot first though, or you’ll soon run out of people willing to taste what you’ve created. Don’t be afraid to be creative. Creativity is inventing, experimenting, growing, taking risks, breaking the rules, making mistakes and most of all… Having fun! Create some crazy combinations and keep testing different flavors.
5
Improve by Balancing and Enhancing Flavors
Understanding how to combine and balance flavors is an important concept that will allow you to create flavor in your juices. When you combine flavors, you achieve a delicious balance in taste. There are 5 flavors: Salti, Sour, Sweet, Bitter and Spicy.
The 5 flavors will enhance to bring out the other flavor or it balance to counteract other Flavours. It’s why ginger, that’s spicy works so well with sweet fruits and vegetables like apples, carrots, and red beets. Sour balances spice and sweetness. It can make your juices fresh or give it a sense of coolness. Most of the green vegetables are bitter. To make it a bit easier to enjoy the bitter veggies, you can add some sweet, salty or even sour. That’s why green juices work well with a little bit of apple (sweet), or lemon (sour). But when we mix and match the precise ingredients, they come together and form something entirely new. The combinations are endless.
And it’s not only the mixing of flavors an colors. It’s also different nutrients coming together. Like art, great tasting juices come from combining what exists into what has never existed before.
Congrats! You’ve worked your way through developing a recipe. From all of the juices, you’ve created. Some might taste horrible. Some need some work to improve. But there are always a few surprises that break into a whole new level of how good juice can taste!
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