Imagine a bar that actually nourishes the customers’ health. The bar serves shots all right, just that it is in the form of vitamin and protein boosters.

The ‘kick’ is such that it is perfectly okay for anyone to drink and drive! What we are talking about is a long due revolution of fresh fruit juice chains.

So, what is the idea?Simply put, the idea is to have a bar with the ambience and goodies that are at par with those in coffee shops. The key difference being that this bar offers fresh fruit juices instead of coffee. The idea is to conceive brands like Café Coffee Day and Barista in the space of fresh fruit juices.

The idea, one might say, is not original. Give it a second thought, and you already know that not many out there are exploiting this space as much as one can. Call it a coincidence, the launch of one such chain happened during the gestation of this story.

Bloom Juices is the brainchild of 28-year-old Amit Roy Sharma. In the scorching month of May 2008, Sharma launched his first concept store in Mohali, backed by a solid investment by Canadian investors. Soon the store will have a presence in Chandigarh and Panchkula. Bloom claims to be India’s first fruit drinks outlet to offer an array of drinks made from fresh fruits without the use of any artificial colorings or flavors. Going further, it also boasts of offering ayurvedic health boosters that are 100% organic and packed with nutritional values.

The concept of a chain of fresh fruit juice bars may be of novelty to India, but this concept has garnered good volumes of business in the west since decades. Smoothie is what fresh fruit juice is popularly known as out there. Dubbed as a high-end smoothie restaurant chain, Jamba Juice of the United States of America has more than 700 outlets within and outside the country, with reported annual sales of over $300 million (January 2008). Other smoothie giants abroad include companies such as Booster Juice of Canada, Boost of Australia, New Zealand Naturals, and others.

Increasingly, the buzzword in the metros and other big cities is on the lines of health, good living, yoga, etc. For this, they have gymnasiums and spas coming up to tone their bodies. Nevertheless, where do they hang out? Places that serve caffeine, alcohol? Again, do they have much of a choice here?Is there a market?Of course, and it is a huge market at that. However, as one might guess, it is highly unorganized. The forerunners in this space, in all the cities, are the numerous roadside vendors and handful of fruit juice shops. There are questions of hygiene, quality, and health in the minds of the consumers. Do they have much of a choice though?

Take a look at the recent data, based on a market study, on fresh fruit juice consumption across the country (see box). That is the market, thirsty and ready, and still, not it in its entirety. If reports online are to be believed, the fresh fruit juice market in India is nothing less than Rs 300 crore at the moment, and will steadily grow at 35-40% per year.

Sourcing the fruitsThanks to the improved roadways and transport systems in the country, the wholesale fruit mandis have an ample supply of local fruits from other states as well. “When we were gestating, we realized that importing frozen fruits like blueberries, blackberries, etc will get the cost of each smoothie to go up to Rs 200, which was a price tag that we were not interested in anymore,” recalls Sharma, “Instead, we source all fruits from the local markets. In a city like Chandigarh, I honestly do not know how they get it, but I get all the fruits there. For instance, I can easily get kiwis, mangoes, four different kinds of apples—the UP apple, the Chinese apple, the Fiji apple, and the Himachal apples.”

However, dependence on these markets as the only point of sourcing is not enough. It is all the more beneficial for the business if coconuts from Kerala, apples from Kashmir, mangoes from Maharashtra, and pineapples from West Bengal reach all the outlets of the fresh fruit juice bars. This is where logistics and supply chains come into play. One needs to devise a plan to get this movement happening, in a cost-effective way while preserving the freshness of the fruits. Of course, frozen fruits are widely available. These, however, will not give the same effect that one would desire at a fresh fruit juice bar. But inevitably, as the season heads towards winter, some fruits such as mangoes that have demand all year along, have to be replaced with sliced frozen mangoes by suppliers.

One big challenge in this line of business is to keep the supply of fruits consistent all year round. “The workaround or trick is to have two menus at the bar. One is the fixed menu consisting of fruits that are easily available throughout the year,” says Sharma, “The other menu has to be a rotating menu, which consists of seasonal fruits. This way the bar can avoid disappointing customers who see some mix on the menu that is not available at that moment due to its seasonal nature.”

Besides this, one could also try exploiting the good base of fruits that are readily available in the country, but is hugely underutilized. This issue of DARE has a story on such underutilized fruits and the ways to commercialize them, which you might want to read. Similarly listed is a list of exotic fruits, in the said article, which could deck up the menu of the fresh fruit juice bars to quite an extent.

Working out the add-onsIt is obvious that the menu if kept limited to just juices would not be appealing enough for the customers, and not to mention would also limit the revenues to quite an extent. So what is it that one could do differently? The smoothie chains abroad offer what they call health boosters, which include vitamin boosters, protein boosters, and such.

Sharma is doing the same, but differently. At Bloom Juices, the customer walks into the store and orders a smoothie from the menu. The attendant will ask if the customer would like to go for a shot of one of their ayurvedic boosters, which are again of the vitamin, protein, and other such forms. Bloom Juices has full-time ayurvedic doctors who lead the R&D team. These doctors do the mix-and-match to come up with health boosters for the store. The lead doctor of Bloom Juices, Dr Rahul Mishra, has a new extraction method apparently. For instance, the awla powder that one gets in the market is brown, but by the use of their unique method the powder is sea green in color. The testing of the nutritional value of this extract was done at a lab in Canada, and in some cases the value was supposedly over 400% more than what one usually gets in the markets.