Growing up on a wheatbelt farm, most of what was in our fridge, we grew, milked, or raised ourselves. That was just life.
One time it wasn't. A bottle of "freshly squeezed" orange juice, store-bought.
Two things happened. Dustin and I both wondered why it didn't taste anything like the juice off our own tree. And every time I drank it, I'd get acid burps the whole walk up the driveway to catch the school bus. When I went back to making my own, the burps went away. Funny what your body tells you if you let it.
Same fruit, though. They started with oranges. We started with oranges. So what happened in between?
Turns out, a lot. It just took us years to go looking for the answer.
What we went looking for
That search led us to a bloke called Don Tolman, "the wholefoods cowboy" (yep, that's really what they called him). Being country kids ourselves, that landed instantly. One line stuck: let food be thy medicine.
After that, we knew what we wanted. Give people the healthiest possible choice when it comes to juice. Made exactly the way you'd make it at home. No shortcuts. We believed then, and still do, that juice made this way is genuinely healthy, nourishing even, done right.
What's really in "orange juice"
Turns out plenty of what's sold as fresh isn't fresh at all. Concentrate. Added sugar. Processing built to make juice shelf-stable for months instead of days. All of it dressed up as "freshly squeezed" on the label.
That's the con. Companies giving the illusion of something farm fresh and healthy through clever marketing terms, rather than actually being real.
So we did it ourselves
There was one other person doing straight-pressed juice at the time, over in Fremantle. But nobody was servicing the Swan Valley or the regional areas. Us included. If you were out our way, there was no one to buy this from.
Cold-pressed juice was just starting to grow as a category. We were getting produce straight off farms and juicing it the same day. We joked, half-joked really, that made this way, it was possibly the healthiest juice on the planet.
The joke stuck. That's how we ended up calling ourselves the World's Healthiest Juice Company. That was 2012. We've been juicing the same way, same standard, ever since. Fourteen years and counting.
We know now "world's healthiest" isn't something anyone can actually claim. Not us, not anyone. But what we can prove is this: from that bottle in the fridge onward, we've done things the healthiest way we know how. Not because we can rank ourselves against the planet. Because it's the only way Dustin and I know how to make anything.