Pure Sweets Now Offering Low-Sugar Fresh-Pressed Juice

The Pure Tonics line | Photo by Tommy Leonardi

Hat tip to Gavin at Unite Fitness for giving me the heads up on yet another new fresh-pressed juice option in our area. This time, it comes courtesy of Pure Sweets, an organic, vegan, kosher, gluten-free bakery based in East Falls, which just launched an all-organic juice line, Pure Tonics, last week.

Owner Andrea Kyan says she’s been juicing at home for 10 years, well ahead of the recent juicing boom. But now that juicing’s gone mainstream, she noticed that many of the fresh juice options on the market are overloaded with sugar, largely because they’re so fruit-heavy. So, as with her bakery, which creates sweet treats with more healthful ingredients, Andrea decided to create a juice line that has less sugar—half as much as other juices, she says—by using mainly veggies and juuuust enough fruit to make them palatable. She also decided to use all organic fruits and veggies and to go local whenever possible; most of the produce in her juices comes from the Lancaster Farm Fresh Co-op.

Andrea got her first taste of fresh fruit-and-veggie juice on a vacation in Mexico, where she sipped a spinach and pineapple combo. “That was the first time I thought, Oh my God, this is amazing,” she says. When she got home, she started playing around with different combinations until she found ones that worked—and her juicing habit has stuck ever since.

“I noticed an instant boost in my energy level. I lost weight naturally, and didn’t need afternoon naps,” she says. “My skin even cleared up, and I eventually realized I didn’t crave sugar any more. Over time, juicing developed my taste for raw greens that I didn’t like before.”

Pure Tonics takes her best recipes—14 in all, with nine available weekly on a rotating, seasonal basis—and bottles them up for the masses. Andrea cautions newbies that her concoctions aren’t the super-sweet mixtures you’re used to (although she can sweeten them up a tad if you wish). And while the product line is too young to peg a most popular flavor just yet, Andrea’s betting on the nut milks, which, she says, taste like dessert. Her personal favorite is the Fitler Square (named for her home neighborhood, natch), which is a no-water-added mixture of Swiss chard, spinach, cucumber, fennel and grapefruit or ginger.

The juices go for $11 or $12 for 18 ounces and $6 or $7 for nine ounces. They’re available to order online—you’ll get your juices, made the night before delivery, three days later—or you can pick them up at Unite Fitness at 12th and Sansom and (very soon) Barre Focus Fitness in Haverford.