Whole-fruit smoothie drink is latest project for Cottle Farms
FAISON, NC — It’s a delicious and healthful Muscadine smoothie drink, called JuVn8, five years and millions of dollars in the making, coming soon to a grocery store near you — Ron Cottle hopes.
The president of Cottle Farms has been on a mission to produce a retail-ready product that not only taps into the health-conscious consumer market but also uses all of the strawberries, blueberries and grapes that go into it, including the seeds and skins of the grapes and even the leafy caps of the strawberries.
Ron Cottle, president of Cottle Strawberry Nursery & Farms, has led a five-year effort to produce a Muscadine grape smoothie drink called ‘Juvenate’ or JuVn8, as its label reads.
From retail trials in hundreds of stores, a five-day sampling by 26,000 patrons at the North Carolina State Fair, and other feedback, JuVn8 was set to debut in December in a larger 15.2-ounce bottle, with a 100-day date-stamped shelf life and a rejuvenated label designed to appeal to health-conscious younger consumers. A bottle will retail for about $2.99, Cottle estimated.
Cottle believes that the December launch will include supermarkets and other retailers in the East Coast and Midwest, carrying two flavors: grape-blueberry and grape-strawberry. A third flavor, a mixture of all three fruits — grape, blueberry and strawberry — is in the wings awaiting trials, Cottle noted. Eastern regional stores such as Food Lion, Whole Foods and Harris-Teeter were among those involved in the field trials.
“Last year, heavy rains ruined about half of our strawberry crop,” Cottle explained. “If we could have harvested that crop and frozen it as a puree in our 55-gallon drums for later use in grape and strawberry smoothies, that would have saved half our crop.”
Most years, the loss is about 15-20 percent of the blueberry, grape and strawberry crop, he said. “Even so, that’s 15 to 20 percent that had been wasted but now is being used,” he added.
The process of bringing an entirely new product to the retail market has been a learning experience, according to Cottle. “It’s the hardest thing I’ve ever done,” he said. “I was just a grower, and I had to learn a lot about bottling. One of the most difficult things was finding a blender that could pulverize the tough, leathery skins and hard, woody seeds of the Muscadine grape.”
A Muscadine variety known as Scuppernong, named for a river in North Carolina, is the state fruit of North Carolina.
Cottle credits Keith Harris, an award-winning associate professor of food science and researcher at N.C. State University in Raleigh, with helping develop the idea to make a healthful drink using Muscadine grapes. That was in 2009, when Cottle began growing Muscadine grapes on his strawberry and blueberry farms. He now grows 100 acres of Muscadines and has an additional 70 acres under contract.
Muscadine has unique phytochemical properties rich in antioxidants that protect against heart disease and cancer, researchers have found.
“And it passed the taste test with flying colors at the state fair,” Cottle noted. “Everyone said it was delicious.”
