Cold-Pressed VS Centrifugal Juice – Part 1: Real Nutritional Data

Written by juice business consultant Ari Sexner, and Charlie Wettlaufer, CEO.

Parts 2 and 3 of this series will include shelf life and yield testing.

Introduction

I have found it difficult sometimes to explain the health benefits of using a cold-press juicer over a centrifugal juicer without any hard evidence. Truth be told, eating two pounds of produce raw and fresh from the farm would be the best way, but definitely not the easiest or most practical.  Nutrients start to break down immediately, like a countdown that starts right when the produce is harvested. The biggest factor in juicing, however, is between centrifugal and cold-press, how much of a difference does this make in the nutritional content?

To answer the question above, we decided to use a certified lab to test three produce varieties that are major staples in the juicing industry. We chose one vitamin in each produce variety to test, picking the vitamin that the vegetable is a major source of. For the equipment, we used a typical centrifugal commercial juicer and compared the same product on a cold press juicer. To keep everything as consistent as possible we juiced all the test samples with the same batch of produce at the same time. Although there are many variables that could affect the results, we did the tests identically, with the only difference being the extraction process with the different juicers.

Produce Varieties and Nutrients

We tested for the following:

Carrot Juice – Vitamin A
Beet Juice – Vitamin B9 (Folate)
Kale – Vitamin C

The Equipment

For the juice equipment, we used:

Cold-Press – Goodnature Countertop CT7 with Robot Coupe Blixer 6v for grinding Centrifugal – Nutrifaster N450

Carrot Test

Carrots are a great source of many vitamins but are highest in Vitamin A. Here are the results, the vitamin content for Vitamin A in the cold press juice was 15% higher, with 10,000 IU/100g vs 8,500 IU/100g:

Beet Test

Beets are extremely high in Vitamin B9-Folate. Folic acid and vitamin folate are almost identical in nature, the main difference is folate is naturally forming and water soluble where folic acid is synthetic. For this test, Cold press came in 16.2% higher with 31 mcg/100g vs 26 mcg/100g:

Kale Test

Kale is loaded with lots of different vitamins and minerals, it was between Vitamin A or Vitamin C, since we already tested Vitamin A with the carrots we decided to go with Vitamin C. The test results came back 13.1% higher in the cold press, with 23 mg/100 vs 20 mcg/100g:

Results Table

Download Data

Download raw report data:

Carrot Juice – Vitamin A
Beet Juice – Vitamin B9 (Folate)
Kale – Vitamin C