Franchising Health and Wellness (Podcast)

In this episode of The Main Course, host Barbara Castiglia talked with Steve Schulze, the Founder of Nékter Juice Bar, a juice bar that is at the forefront of the juice cleanse revolution with cold-pressed juices, smoothies, and acai bowls. The duo talked about surviving the pandemic, Schulze’s path to launching the juice bar, and their plans for expansion.

When Steve Schulze and his wife Alexis started Nékter Juice Bar in 2010, neither of them had ever had a job in the restaurant space, not even as a waiter. They went into it with little experience, but they saw an opportunity in the $2.2 billion a year industry.

Around the time Nékter launched, there was a seismic shift in how people viewed health and wellness. Consumers were buying into more whole foods, viewing food as medicine, and there was a proliferation of Whole Foods and Trader Joe’s. When he started looking at the juice bar category, he had just left the infomercial world where he was selling juice cleanses.

When the economy tanked in 2008, it was hard to get an infomercial show produced. He started thinking about other ventures and decided to reinvent the juice bar space similar to Starbucks reinventing the coffee space in the early 1990s.

A new episode of The Main Course, our podcast series with MarketScale, is served up every Tuesday and Thursday.