The juice craze shows no signs of slowing down. It seems like almost every neighborhood has at least one spot. A Dallas-based company has plans to enter the growing market, and it’s betting that Houstonians will like what its pouring.
Buda Juice will open its first Houston-area location in Rice Village next month. While many juice bars offer cold-pressed beverages, Buda Juice takes things a step further.
“We get our product from the fields and put it into refrigerated trucks all the way to Dallas,” Chairman and CEO Horatio Lonsdale-Hands tells CultureMap. “Then our whole facility, 5,000-square feet, is refrigerated. We actually cold press at 34 degrees, where other people are cold-pressing at room temperature.”
By cold-pressing in a cold room, Lonsdale-Hands argues that Buda Juice’s products retain more of their nutrients and enzymes than his competition. This point of differentiation is so important to Buda Juice that its retail locations include a TV screen that shows customers what’s happening at the processing facility.
Buda will make daily deliveries from Dallas to Houston, which ensures customers are receiving a fresh product — whether that’s something classic like orange juice or more elaborate combinations like the company's signature red (celery, beet, apple, etc.) or green (spinach, cucumber, celery, etc) juice.
Each store features white bamboo floors and a glass-cased cooler that displays the juices in glass bottles. The clean, healthy image reinforces that benefits of drinking juice, Lonsdale-Hands says, which is why so many of his customers opt to participate in a juice cleanse.
“A cleanse is fantastic because people want to lose weight, they want to reset, they want to eat differently. We sell a lot of cleanses,” he says.
Of course, Buda Juice’s first Houston location won’t be its last. The company that already has 23 locations in Dallas and 11 in Toronto has signed a lease at The Woodlands Mall, and Lonsdale-Hands says he’s looking at other possibilities. If Houstonians embrace Buda to the same extent Dallasites have, the demand will certainly exist.
Buda Juice is coming to Rice Village.
A rendering previews the restaurant's new location.Courtesy of Saigon Hustle
Saigon Hustle co-founders Cassie Ghaffar and Sandy Nguyen.Photo by Al Torres