Stoke Cold Pressed Juice, a locally owned juice company, started off as a farmers market venture in 2019 before expanding to the wholesale retail side of juice in 2021—but it was tricky.

“Juice is a difficult product to work with wholesale because it’s 100% legal to sell raw juice [directly] to a consumer. ... As soon as I am selling it wholesale to another business and they’re keeping it on their shelf and selling it to someone, it is illegal to sell raw juice,” co-owner Jonathan Laing said.

The options

Two of the most common ways to sell juice in a grocery store are through heat pasteurization and high-pressure pasteurization. Heat pasteurization requires heat to “cook off” all pathogens, and high-pressure pasteurization requires the product to be stored in a plastic container, which is then submerged into a machine to collapse the cell structure to destroy pathogens and prevent them from duplicating to sustain a longer shelf life, Laing said.

As he began doing more research, he discovered another method that would give him the ability to sell juice: ultraviolet light filtration. It had a catch, though—no one does it.

“It was a bit of a gamble to use UV because there was almost no literature out there. It was very hard to find actual peer-reviewed studies on the effects of ultraviolet light on different juice compounds,” Laing said.

But in his eyes, this was Laing’s best option; it was still Food and Drug Administration approved, and it allows the product to be stored in glass and sold through wholesale while being the coldest form of shelf stabilization.

Now, Laing’s juice shop operates out of a warehouse facility in Buda.

A closer look

Stoke Cold Pressed Juice offers an assortment of juices along with three different levels of juice cleanses. The juice shop also offers weekly and biweekly subscriptions.

All of Stoke Cold Pressed Juice juices are made in-house. Although the UV method reduces their juice shelf life to two to three weeks, the juice shop operates on a consignment business model.

The juice shop delivers juices weekly to different businesses in the area, and any unsold juice is bought back at 100% credit, eliminating the risk that business partners will lose out on money with a short-shelf life product while still delivering a fresh, quality product to their customers, who can also receive $2 back for every glass bottle they return.

Stoke Cold Pressed Juice

1705 Robert S. Light Blvd., Unit 104

https://usa.stokejuice.com