DECEMBER 2017 • COUNTRY LIFE IN BC
Entrepreneurs squeeze a profit
from pressed fruit Mobile juicing line one of growing number of mobile food processors
by MYRNA STARK LEADER
KELOWNA – The road to business success is paved with juice for Vernon entrepreneurs Kristen and Remo Trovato.
The couple launched
Okanagan Mobile Juicing Inc. in 2012 and Kristen, a former rock climber and skier, is still pumped about juicing. “I just never get sick of it. All those apples coming in,” she says, pausing a second to inhale as if the fruit were right in front of her. “The Macs smell different than the Ambrosia. I just love it.” The juicy story of how the
Trovatos launched what remains a home-based business begins with Remo’s previous work as a website designer. Asked to create a website for another mobile juicer, Remo saw an opportunity to enter a new field.
“He walked into my husband’s business one day looking for a website and then my husband brought the idea back home to me and I thought, ‘I can do that. I want to do that,’” she recalls. The client, now a competitor, sold the Trovatos their first machine and this season the couple pressed about 90,000 litres of cherry juice and more than 200,000 litres of apple juice. Kristen, an energetic mother of two toddlers, runs the back end of the business and Remo handles more of the operational side. This is the first year the Trovatos have hired full-time help to move and operate the equipment, which travels from customer to customer in a 175-square-foot trailer. “There’s a large bin-tipper that comes out the back where the bins of fruit are loaded and then that dumps the fruit into a water basin. The fruit is washed and then it goes up an elevator into the grinder and the ground apple pomace goes into the press and we squish the juice out,” Kristen explains.
The juice is pasteurized in a machine capable of processing 1,200 litres per hour, then hot-filled into bags and boxed. It’s a slick operation. The current line, like the previous two the couple have owned, is from Europe, where mobile juicing is more common.
“We started with a very small mobile unit but we’ve grown. We used to average 8,000 pounds a day and now we average over 16,000,” she explains. “We started off with the small pack press. We modified that trailer to have a continual belt press and then we replaced that whole trailer with a higher-capacity machine. Then, we replaced that trailer again this year.”
Cherries Initially, the Trovatos only
worked in the fall with apples. Then, three years ago, they added a destoner which enables them to work in the summer with cherries. The destoner is added to the trailer as needed. “Instead of the fruit falling into the grinder which doesn’t accommodate the pit, it bypasses the grinder and slides into a destoner which separates the fruit from the pit and then we treat the fruit with an enzyme to separate out the juice,” explains Kristen. Customers include growers
and orchards that sell direct to the public. Some growers want juice produced in the background while others have the machine operating front and centre so that customers can see how their unsweetened juice is made. Now, juice flows from July
to November and sometimes even December, proving profitable for the Trovatos and their customers. It takes about 3.3 pounds of apples and four pounds of cherries to make a litre of juice.
Kristen and Remo Trovato didn’t start out in agriculture but they now operate a thriving mobile juicing business serving apple and cherry growers in the Okanagan. Are blueberries next? MYRNA STARK LEADER PHOTO
Agriculture wasn’t in the
Trovatos’ background prior to starting the juicing company. She was born and raised in BC, while he’s from Switzerland.
But both of them could see an opportunity to add value to local fruit. While fresh fruit always sells at a higher price, the mobile juicing line helps growers add value to excess and cull fruit. “We show up on site and
it’s their fruit that goes in and it’s their juice that is produced. They have a great product that they can sell year-round and make money,” says Kristen. The Okanagan is home to
just four or five other mobile food processors. This has given the Trovatos an edge in the market, but growth hasn’t been without its challenges. Choosing a juice storage box that looks good and is a good size was one. “We dove in with all our
naiveté and energy and it has been a great success for us.
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We’ve come a long way,” says Kristen.
The business continues to
grow, confronting the Trovatos with their next challenge: pause, or continue? “Yes, we could grow it
more, but do we want to?” Kristen asks. “As entrepreneurs, we don’t know how to stop. We don’t know how to say no. In the years that we’ve been processing, there’s been many other spin- off businesses and ideas and clients that want more. There’s more demand all over the place. So, at this point in the business, there are many open doors and we just need to take the next step.” One opportunity cropped up in 2014 when the Trovatos purchased belt presses and a
new trailer from Austria’s Kreuzmayr Maschinenbau GmbH. The connections they had developed in the industry allowed them to facilitate several other sales for the company, enough that Kreuzmayr appointed them its North American distributor. Among the options they’re considering right now are purchasing another trailer or building a processing plant that would allow them to serve international markets. Diversifying into blueberry juice is yet another option. While future possibilities abound and there’s more to do, Kristen was recently processing fruit to make juice for her own family. Business owners need to take time to enjoy the fruits of their labours, too.
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