What You Need To Know About Cold-Pressed Juice (And Why You Should Go Green)

Do you have a juicer gathering dust in your cabinet? Are you confused about the green bottles you see in the hands of starlets and yogis? Have you noticed the cold case in your grocery store being taken over by a rainbow of cold-pressed juices? You’re not alone! We break down the “what’s what” in the world of juice and explain why green juice is not your mama’s OJ.

Juicing vs. Cold Pressed Juice

The biggest difference between the cold-pressed juice and juicing at home is the final processing step. At home, you pour your juice in a glass or jar and enjoy it before microbes and oxygen spoil it.

In cold-pressed juice, the cold juice is bottled, sealed and put in a large chamber, which fills with water and applies a crushing amount of pressure (equal to 5 times the pressure found at the deepest part of the ocean) to inactivate pathogens. This allows cold-pressed juice companies (like Evolution Fresh) to ship you juice that tastes vibrant and is safe for a few weeks instead of a few days.

You can get cold-pressed juice in a variety of flavors from 100% Orange Juice to complex, dense Green juices. Cold-Pressed juice that you find in bottles starts out by using huge hydraulic presses that press fruits and veggies through fine mesh getting nearly all of the juice out of the produce. For citrus, they use high speed extractors to get deliciously bright juice from oranges, grapefruit, lemons and limes. When the extraction process is done, you get naturally vibrant juice, that is bottled and High Pressure Processed.

If you do go for bottled juice, make sure it says cold-pressed or High Pressure Processed on the bottle and pay attention to juices that are high in sugar or list ingredients you don’t recognize as fruit juice. If you want something sweet, go for a Super Green™ but if you want juice that’s low-sugar and made from leafy greens, go for Essential Greens™.

Juicing at home certainly gets you the freshest juice, but not everyone is comfortable going from zero to kale. When juicing at home, aim for nutrient-dense fruits and vegetables. Take the juice from leafy greens and powerhouse root veggies as your base, then add citrus or fruit to sweeten the taste.

Juicing at home enables you to decrease the fruit and increase the veggies, so over time you should find yourself enjoying greener, less sweet juices. If you’re not sold on buying a juicer, try Evolution Fresh Sweet Greens and Lemon™ for a refreshing intro to green juice.

What about the juicers themselves?

There is a hardcore juicing debate over what home juicer is the best for extracting the most nutrition. Masticating juicers grind and press the produce while centrifugal juicers grate, shred and spin the pulped produce, extracting the juice through a fine screen.

Critics of both extraction methods point to nutrition lost in the process, noise of the machines and the messy cleanup. Do your research before investing, juicers can cost anywhere between a couple hundred to over a thousand dollars (depending on the size and model.)

So what's right for me?

Like many things in our lives, it's about balancing convenience with cost. Juicers can be expensive and take time to clean. Depending on your morning routine, this can discourage people from juicing on week days. Keeping produce crisp and tasty in the fridge can also be a challenge. Although it hurts to waste any produce, trust us, juicing wilted kale is a bad idea.