iF Juice was founded in 2007 by 2 Germans - Hans Au and Flo Eysler - to bring fresh juices and smoothies with high nutrition and great taste to Beijing. No addittives, preservatives, sugar or water are added to our drinks - we are natural pure juice!
iF juices are daily fresh. They are not pasteurized and therefore we give them a 24h shelf life. However, if you keep them well refrigerated (0-4 degrees) they are good for 2, maximum 3 days. As a general rule of thumb: the sweeter a juice, the easier it spoils (e.g. Watermelon, Blueberry/Apple, Pineapple). The more acidic, the longer you can keep them (e.g. Orange, Grapefruit, Apple/Raspberry, Apple/Starfruit). There is no difference between small and big bottles - same content, just different size.
At iF we always use the freshest fruit possible - the longer they are stored, the more nutrients are lost. However, some fruit are only available for a couple of weeks in a year. Our mango for example is a very tasty and handpicked variety from Sichuan. In August when they are at the peak of their ripeness, they get harvested, washed, sorted, cut into halves and frozen immediately. By that way nutrients and vitamins are kept intact until we blend it into our drinks. So actually freezing is a great way to naturally preserve fruit and vegetables.
Almost every fruit can be found in the Middle Kingdom as it stretches from the border with Russia far up in the North-East down to the tropical island of Hainan and Yunan in the South. For some fruit however we go shopping abroad: pineapples from The Philippines, grapefruit from South Africa and summer oranges from Florida. Most important for us at iF is the quality of the fruit – be sure that we go for lengths to find the very best for you!
Being two Germans to found and run iF Juice, we have our eagle eyes on hygiene and operate based on international practice. We aim for a HACCP certification by the end 2010.
All vegetables we use are organically certified. Our fruit are non-organic. We’d like to say a couple of words about that: veggies generally grow fast so setting up an organic plantation requires the soil being free of pesticide use for at least 3 years and fairly soon after that the first harvest can start. We always buy from the same farms. Certified organic fruit however are available just in small scale (partly due to the fact that only 3 years after pesticide free soil you can start planting say an apple tree. Until it is ready to harvest you’ll have to wait another 3-5 years). Furthermore, especially with fruit there is a lot of false labeling which we don’t wanna go into more detail now..
At iF we clean our raw material in a 3-step process followed by sorting before we use it for our juices. Finally we believe our orange and grapefruit juices come closest to be organic products as pesticide levels inside of these fruit are low and due to the special extraction machinery we use contact between the inner fruit flesh (which finally gets squeezed) and the skin is kept at an absolute minimum.
If you want to go for pure organic, no problem either: we can highly recommend you our Organic Carrot Juice (a real delight!).
Our plastic bottles are not suitable for commercial re-use due to hygiene reasons. If our customers hand empty bottles back to us they get returned to plastic producers. Similar to the global recycling of scrap steel our plastic bottles are then rinsed, shredded to chips, heated up and fed into the production or forming of new plastic products. While this is not the cleanest and most environmentally advanced way (these are not readily available yet in China) many thousands of underprivileged people live off this basic way of recycling (.. you might have seen them around Beijing with their tricycles packed with empty bottles, etc.).
We deliberately choose not to pasteurize our juices and smoothies because we want to keep the product as natural as possible, both in terms of nutrients and flavor. Just like you would be doing it at home! We are processing in a very clean environment (see pictures at “how it gets done”) and use professional, food grade sterilizing agents for our bottles and caps from the US brand “Ecolab”.
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