Getting Back to Basics in the Health Market?

On this episode of The Main Course, Host Barbara Castiglia talked
with Steve Schulze, the Founder of Nékter Juice Bar, a juice bar
that is at the forefront of the juice cleanse revolution with
cold-pressed juices, smoothies, and acai bowls. The duo talked
about surviving the pandemic, Schulze’s path to launching the
juice bar, and their plans for expansion.


When Steve Schulze and his wife Alexis started Nékter Juice Bar
in 2010, neither of them had ever had a job in the restaurant
space, not even as a waiter. They went into it with little
experience, but they saw an opportunity in the $2.2 billion a
year industry.


“If I go back to the beginning stages of it, I was working out
and going to the legacy brands, The Jambas and the Smoothie
Kings, thinking I was eating healthy. Low and behold, I came to
find out that a lot of those had become glorified Dairy Queens.”
- Steve Schulze


Schulze is referring to the added sugar that’s added in some of
these legacy juice bar brands.  Around the time Nékter
launched, there was a seismic shift in how people viewed health
and wellness. Consumers were buying into more whole foods,
viewing food as medicine, and there was a proliferation of Whole
Foods and Trader Joe’s. When he started looking at the juice bar
category, he had just left the infomercial world where he was
selling juice cleanses.


When the economy tanked in 2008, it was hard to get an
infomercial show produced. He started thinking about other
ventures and decided to reinvent the juice bar space similar to
Starbucks reinventing the coffee space in the early 1990s.