Start a Juice Bar - Helping You Open a Successful Juice Bar

Regardless of how much you research the ins and outs of starting your own business – you will still likely make mistakes as a beginner. You can only learn some things with experience. However, taking a few tips from learned experts can turn their “hindsight” into your guidelines. Not only can that put you years ahead, but it also saves you a ton of money.

This article looks at some detrimental juice bar business mistakes that entrepreneurs commonly make.

1. To Start a Juice Bar Without a Commercial Juicer

You simply can’t run a juice business with your simple kitchen juicer – even if you’re starting a small business from home. Having the correct equipment is the bare minimum for entering the juice industry. Without it, you cannot achieve the quality, quantity, and yield rate required to meet commercial standards in the long run. It’s a purchase you just can’t avoid – especially as you scale your business with time. So, it’s best to swallow that pill right away.

Professional juicers don’t break down easily despite continuous use, unlike home juicers. They also don’t need as much prepping for the produce, saving you significant amounts of money on repair and labor costs.

2. Poor Selection of Recipes

Like any other business, a juice bar has a very low tolerance for risk at the very beginning. So, for a startup juice bar, improve your chances of entering the market successfully by focusing on a strategic menu.

There’s more to creating a great juice bar menu than tasty recipes. You need to ensure that you also consider:

Availability of ingredients (seasonality)
Cost of ingredients, which impacts the profitability of each menu item
Access to ingredients (vendor options)
Time-efficient recipes to serve customers fast
Storage space is available for ingredients to have enough on hand to meet order quantities.

Reach out to us and we can help you put together the right combination of recipes for your new business to make your customers love the service and product, and ensure that you have a profitable business.

3. Not Seeking Expert Advice

These days, information is highly accessible and it’s easy to feel like you know everything you need to know before taking your first step. But that, as most juice bar owners would tell you, is a common (and costly) mistake.

Regardless of how well-read you are on the topic, you couldn’t possibly be exposed to the knowledge and practice that experts in the field have already experienced over the last decade or two. So, the biggest mistake that new juice bar business owners make is missing out on their guidance.

Even the simplest corrective tips — such as editing your menu, optimizing your pricing, or simply finding vendors with cheaper costs and better quality — can make or break your juice startup. Competition is fiercer than ever, which makes these tips even more valuable.

We offer our clients expert guidance on all of those fronts and can also expose them to our network of high-value vendors to make sure they always get premium-quality ingredients at competitive prices.

4. Not Investing in Your Marketing First

Most beginners tend to put off marketing until the business is established, and there’s enough cash flow to pay for advertising on different platforms. But that’s not the right business model to follow.

You can’t wait till your own juice bar business is established to pay for your marketing. That’s because you may not see any meaningful growth without an effective marketing strategy to fuel it.

Remember that marketing comes first, and sales follow — not the other way around.

But every dollar you spend in the early days of your business needs to be spent wisely. While marketing is always a great thing to invest in, ineffective marketing isn’t.

Take advantage of our expert consultancy services to make sure your marketing strategy has the most impact on your target audience and offers the highest return on investment.

5. Not Understanding Marketing Phases

The best place to market your business is online through social media campaigns, Facebook, Google, and Instagram ads. But many digital marketing strategies fail because of a lack of understanding of the marketing phases — one of the most common juice bar mistakes!

Marketing for juice bars can be broadly divided into two phases, each having specific objectives that are crucial for customer acquisition and conversion rates.

i) Saturation

Saturation marketing aims to make people aware of your business. The objective is to tell the potential customers in your area that your juice bar exists and is open for business.

ii) Retriggering

The retriggering phase of marketing aims to get people to stay in touch with your business. The aim here is to “re-trigger” their visits (physically or online) and get them to make more purchases.

Without effective saturation, most of the funds you spend on re-triggering will not have nearly as much impact in terms of conversion and sales. So, if there are still potential customers in your area that don’t know that your business exists, it means you haven’t saturated the market enough.

In the same way, once you have saturated the market, it’s crucial to capitalize on it through effective re-triggering campaigns. Even though your business might be popular in a saturated market, they won’t make as many purchases without being regularly prompted to re-visit you.

In this way, the effectiveness of both of these phases are interdependent — and it takes time for results to show up.

Pro tip: Remember that marketing isn’t a short-term investment but a long-term one. It’s a way to obtain customer loyalty, which won’t pay within the next month, but over the entire course of your business. So, don’t expect sales to skyrocket as soon as you start putting money into marketing.

6. Marketing a Poorly Branded Business

Juice bar mistakes like poor branding can send your entire marketing budget down the drain. That’s because what marketing does is get people to visit and have a look at your business — whether it’s by checking your social media page or showing up at your physical juice shop.

From that point on, the only thing that urges them to make their first purchase is how your business presents itself — i.e. the branding.

Regardless of how much you saturate the market or retrigger your potential customers, it won’t lead to conversions unless you brand your business well. From your website, social media posts, and store design to more detailed branding like logo design and even your written brand voice.

Getting your branding right is one of the trickiest steps to building a successful juice bar. At Start A Juice Bar, we have dedicated design teams to help you execute your branding in such a way that attracts maximum attention and conversions to your business. We can help you create your entire brand and execute it in all areas (website, store, social media etc).

To know more about this topic, listen to this podcast by our founder — Andrew McFarland — titled “Marketing Flirts and Branding Converts.”

The Bottom Line: Starting A Juice Business

Taking care of all these intricate details and executing them perfectly is a lot of work, and can easily get a bit too overwhelming. It’s especially stressful when you’ve got important stuff to focus on like achieving and maintaining quality standards, cutting down delivery times, and optimizing customer service — but not with help of experts.

Through our decade’s worth of experience in this field, we’ve helped many startups avoid costly juice bar mistakes and transformed them into successful juice bars. We can streamline your business plan, branding, marketing, menu, pricing, and more.

You also gain access to expert consultation on any other area of the business you need help with. If that sounds helpful for your business, feel free to get in touch with us below.

Mistakes to Avoid When Starting a Juice Bar Business

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