Engineering Cold Pressed Juice Equipment – A Letter From Eric

My Brother, Eric, is Vice President of Engineering at Goodnature, and sent out a wonderful email to myself and the other family members / Goodnature owners today. His words here describe exactly what cold pressed juice equipment is all about:

All,

I’ve been thinking about how to put in words what our goals are. One thing we do is try to design equipment that is based on minimal processing, which sounds like the easiest way to do it, but in fact it is the most difficult. We take a look at the process, distill it down to what is only absolutely necessary, and go from there.

It is tempting as an engineer to over-design processing… heat something up to get it to flow better, use enzymes to make it less slippery, use chemicals to help clean it, preservatives and heat to make it last longer, and so on. The challenge is to take the processing out of beverage production; Figuring how to do it with the natural steps nature has provided us with, so that consumers have access to fresh and healthy beverages. How do you take the hand-made quality of cold pressed juice and scale it up to supply a whole juice bar or juice company? How do you keep things fresh, safe, and healthy without reaching into the food processor’s tool-bag? How do you get enough juice out of each cucumber or apple to stay competitive, with the disadvantage of not using cost-cutting additives and processing steps?

Our challenge is simple: Take fresh fruits and vegetable, shred them, press them, and bottle the juice as quickly and as simply as possible without degrading the product in any way. What complicates the process is that we are living in a world that has gone too far down the processing road. Distributors that want 120 day shelf life, production managers that want to treat produce like it is a chemical or ingredient, instead of a living thing that needs to be handled as such, governing bodies that want food to be processed to a point of being sterile.

Every extra step of processing is a step away from quality. We define quality as being as close to its natural state as possible. Quality is everything.

Eric Wettlaufer
Vice President
Goodnature Products, Inc.