Mobile Juicing
Karnail Singh Sidhu at a mobile juicing event.
Most people know Karnail Singh Sidhu as the award-winning winemaker and 2019 BC Viticulturalist of the Year, and don’t realize he also runs the eco-friendly Mobile Juice Factory.
But the fan of organic, environmentally sound farming is also taking the old adage ‘Waste not, want not’ to a delicious new level.
“We provide orchardists an alternative to dumping, as well as a creating a value-added product,” Sidhu explains. “We serve the smaller fruit grower, someone who might have their own roadside stand. If they have extra fruit at the end of the season or culls that they want to use, we can turn them into juice and pack it up in a bag in the box.”
One of Sidhu’s early clients, Herman Hothi, is a huge fan of the service, and has turned what could have been wasted fruit into a booming part of his business.
Hothi is a farmer and entrepreneur in Kamloops, BC, part of a family that has been running the well-known Heffley Farms for the past 20 years. Hothi also expanded his business in 2011 by opening the popular Nu Leaf Produce Market, selling fresh local products.
Like Sidhu, Hothi has an environmental frame of mind, and hated seeing any food go to waste.
“When we started making juice it came from seeing the amount of waste in apples,” Hothi explains. “There's apples that are too big, too small, some with stem damage, or others with not enough color on the apple that goes to cull or goes to back to compost.
But, there’s nothing wrong with the apples; it’s just not appealing for the retail shelf. So, we thought, why not turn them into something useful that people want?”
Hothi’s other priorities as a farmer and business owner is to provide local goods to local people, and to provide exceptionally high quality, healthy products. All of those goals are being met through the Mobile Juice Factory, and customers have responded so enthusiastically that Nu Leaf’s juices are the primary product featured on the company’s website.
“It’s good for everyone,” Hothi says. “It's a higher price, clean item, and when you tell the story behind it, that it’s salvaged apples that would have ended up in compost, but now turned into juice, that’s an extra selling feature to the customer, right?
“Not only does it taste like real apple juice and has the freshness in it, but you can buy knowing that the story behind the product is important.”
Mobile Juice Factory Staff
Karnail Singh Sidhu runs the eco-friendly Mobile Juice Factory.
With the initial success of pure apple juice, Hothi soon expanded the range by making blends.
“It all started with apple juice, but I saw that everyone had started doing apple juice in the Okanagan and I felt the market was a little bit saturated,” he explains. “So we started
doing some blends of juices. Our most popular one has been the Apple-Beets blend - we do a lot of that - and we do an apple pear, we do pear juice, and we also tried out a pear-beet juice this year, which turned out really well, and we tried some lots with successful ones like apple-carrot.”
Hothi also points out that since his family also farm vegetables, getting culls from those crops is also an issue that’s solved by the Mobile Juice Factory.
“Beets that are too big or beets that are too small, that's what we use for the product, or carrots that aren't perfectly straight, so it's not just fruit that has culls, right? The juicing machine has been very successful with more than just fruit, and we’ve a lot of vegetables go through that machine that might otherwise been wasted.”
For Sidhu, the key to reducing waste in farming is to provide an alternative that is not just cost effective, but is also as easy as possible for the farmer.
The Mobile Juice Factory will travel to an orchard if a grower has as little as 10 bins of fruit, but even then, Sidhu tries to be flexible.
“That is the minimum order that we can process at an orchard site,” he says. “But if I have a call for six bins in Oliver for instance, I will try and connect with another grower in the area and see if we can make up the 10-bin minimum for the trip.”
Even backyard growers can take advantage of the service. “We also offer a juicing service to home growers, through our community juicing events,” Sidhu explains. “Someone who may only have one or two trees in their yard, but they want to put up some juice for their family.
“We set up the juice factory here at the winery in West Kelowna and we also travel to other communities such as Salmon Arm, Armstrong and Abbotsford and hold day-long juicing events,” Sidhu says. “With a minimum of 150 pounds of fruit, the backyard grower will go home with nine or ten, 5-litre bag-in-the-box containers of juice.”
Pressing juice
Hothi, of course, produces juices in much larger quantities, but says it still makes more sense to use the Mobile Juice Factory service, because he typically produces juice once a year, and it is put into inventory for the year. Having a mobile service saves room at the Nu Leaf facility, and reduces capital costs as well.
Hothi also says the pressing process itself has become an attraction for his customers.
“You know, our customers are always amazed with how quickly the machine turns apples into real apple juice that you can store and keep for one year,” he says. “So we find that it's pretty entertaining for a lot of people that don't realize how it’s done, especially the younger audience. Children are always amazed, looking at one end and seeing how that apple is now liquid juice that can be stored and enjoyed for 12 months shelf life.”
When the process is complete, the juice is quickly and easily packaged in a 5-litre bag-in-a-box style container, with Nu Leaf’s custom labelling and branding. The system, he says, is a complete end-to-end service.
For more information, or to book a mobile juicing time, contact Karnail at (250) 307-4122 or visit mobilejuicefactory.com.
