The Story of the Juice Box Cafe

Everyone that comes in to the Juice Box tells us the same thing: "the neighborhood needed you!". We agree, and that's why we started it. Part of it was a selfish desire to eat healthier ourselves. Our staff is split about 50/50 between vegetarians and meat-eaters, but every one of us wanted to eat better. And let's face it, making a big old salad at home isn't easy. Not to mention the challenges of getting a fresh-squeezed juice! We also desperately wanted to be involved in something that had a profoundly positive impact on our customers. If we could help people eat [and live] in a more healthy way, coming to work each day would be a lot more fulfilling. Positive karma is something we all believe in very much. Doing good things tends to bring good things. Lastly, we wanted to build up a business that would last, and could provide good benefits for the employees. We're trying our very best to provide excellent health care, matching retirement, and other benefits (like free healthy food) to our employees.

Ok, so that's we why started the Juice Box. But going from an idea to opening our doors was a lot more work than any of us could have imagined. We've had to make a lot of decisions along the way about sourcing and what kinds of food and drinks we would serve.

We've tried to be true to a few core sets of ideals while making these choices. First off, we're committed to provide healthy food a reasonable prices. Not just reasonable for established Shadysiders, but also reasonable for a college student. This means that we've had to balance our desire for an entirely organic set of ingredients with the fiscal reality that some organic ingredients are simply far too expensive. Plus we're very big proponents of regionalism, and not all of our regional farms are organic. This brings us to our second primary ideal, and that's local sourcing. We try to source everything from apples to corn chips locally. If we expect others to source locally for a sandwich or a smoothie, we should be doing our very best to do the same for our lettuce! This isn't always possible, especially in winter, but we have found a lot of great sources in western PA, and hope to find even more moving forward. Third, we've tried to be as environmentally conscious as possible. Even down to analyzing the environmental impact of PLA cups (cups made out of a compound based on corn) versus using regular plastic and recycling it, we've done our homework, and have chosen what we believe is the most eco-friendly choice. As a side note, we chose to use regular plastic cups because we can recycle them, and because of how resource-intensive PLA production is.

So that's the story of the Juice Box in a nutshell. As much as the neighborhood needed a healthy cafe, we need the support of our neighborhood even more. So come by and say hello the next time you're in the neighborhood, and definitely tell us what you like, and what else we could be doing. We're going to be adding items to our menu in the coming months, and the more input we have from our customers the better.

Regards,

Al Polanec
Owner

http://www.juiceboxpitt.com/