What is cold pressed juice and its benefits?

You may have heard about cold-pressed juice recently and are wondering what is so special about it. This drink trend has been around for several years now and bottles of cold-pressed juice seem to be everywhere from coffee shops to grocery stores. You can even buy your very own cold-pressed juicer to bring all the benefits of this healthy food home with you.

But what is cold-pressed juice, and more importantly, is it really as healthy as everyone says it is?

What is cold pressed juice?

Cold-pressed refers to the method of processing where a juicer extracts the juice from fruit and vegetables. A hydraulic press exerting tremendous pressure is used to squeeze the maximum amount of juice, vitamins, minerals, and enzymes from your favorite raw fruits and vegetables, creating cold-pressed juice. This differs from the normal way of making juice with centrifugal juicers such as blenders or masticating juicers.

Normally, juicers use spinning blades to mash up fruits and veggies to create juice. However, this method creates heat from the friction of the spinning blades. The heat destroys some of the ingredients and removes some of the health benefits.

By comparison, cold-pressed juicing generates minimal heat. High-pressure processing from pressing juicers preserves more of the fruit and veggies that are usually lost during the traditional juicing process. This results in a healthier, fuller glass of juice for your juice cleanse.

As a high-end drink, cold-pressed juice is 3-4 times the price of traditional juice. They are different in the production process. The cold press juice use slow blade to break up fruits, and use high-pressure to squeeze fruit juice. The squeezing process is carried out at the temperature of 4-10℃, so the vitamins and minerals won’t be destroyed.

Cold-pressed juice can preserve the original sugar content without adding extra sugars. Some manufacturer will remain the fibers in juice to promote digestion and keep you feeling full. They have more health benefits for consumers.

The Benefits of Cold-Pressed Juice

When you cold-press your juice, it retains more of the vitamins, enzymes, minerals, and antioxidants than regular juice. This makes it a healthier alternative to traditional juicing. Cold-pressed juice is never exposed to heat during its juicing process, which is important for producing more fruit per serving. You can get the nutrients you need, boost your energy levels, and improve your immune system with each bottle of cold-pressed juice.

Cold-pressed juices can be high in calories because of how dense and concentrated the juice is. One bottle is usually two servings. However, they are much better for your health when you compare them to regular juices at the supermarket as these tend to contain preservatives and lose a significant amount of their nutritional value through more heat-involved processing methods.

Another benefit of cold-pressed juice is that all the ingredients are 100% natural and organic. There are no added sugar or preservatives since the fruit goes straight from the fruit to the bottle. More health benefits are in every bottle because none of the vitamins and minerals are lost in the process.

However, due to the absence of preservatives, cold-pressed juice has a much shorter shelf life than other processed juices. While this means you’ll need to enjoy your tasty cold-pressed juice shortly after squeezing it, it has the added benefit of always ensuring cold-pressed juice is as fresh as it gets.

Now that you know what cold-pressed juice is, you can decide for yourself what type of juice is a better fit for your lifestyle.

How is cold pressed juice made?

Cold press process contains 2 parts: high-pressure extraction, and high-pressure sterilization.

As displayed in the diagram, the high pressure hydraulic press extracts juice and other nutritive contents from fruits and vegetables. Then the high-pressure sterilizer use 600Mpa pressure to achieve the same sterilization effects as UHT or pasteurization. This process is also called high pressure pasteurization(HPP).

Researches have proved HPP technology can preserve the original nutrition and flavor effectively, and prolong the shelf life to around 40 days.

In the whole cold press process, the fruit juice is treated under low temperature to achieve the minimum nutrition loss, such as vitamin C and protein polypeptide.

Cold-pressed juice market

According to the statistics of a food and beverage agency Zenith International, the fruit juice industry will grow by 5% annually, owing to the sales decline of carbonated drinks. However, traditional fruit juice sales also dropped, while high-end drinks, represented by cold pressed juice, have a continuous growth in the past years.

According the reports of Persistence, online retail will drive the sales of cold-pressed juice significantly. Statistics manifests that online retail has a compound annual growth rate of 7.4%, and the sales volume is predicted to reach to 300 million by 2024.

Statistics from Euro Monitor also indicats that traditional FC juice will keep declining by 2021, which will be replaced by cold pressed juice and NFC juice. And cold-pressed juice will come top of all juice categories at the growing rate of 7%.

With more and more Europe and America countries emphasize low sugar diet, and issue sugar tax, cold-pressed juice will have wider market niche.