Where’d you get that bottle?
Big news of the week -and no, I’m not talking about AOL acquiring the Huffington Post - Organic Avenue has officially opened an outpost on Sullivan Street (aka 5 mins from Wolff Olins NY offices, aka I can now get my green juice fix any day of the week!)
For those who don’t know, Organic Avenue is a sweet little vegan raw foods / juice company - started as one small shop in the LES about 10 years ago, slowly expanding ever since. I first happened upon the company as a summer intern, who happened to moonlight as a bartender at the (then) newly opened Pure Food and Wine - one of NYC’s first (and certainly most gourmet) raw foods restaurants.
Born and raised in a town like Boulder, CO, the smell of wheat grass was nothing new to me. But at that time in Manhattan, the idea of raw foods, green juice or ‘eating clean’ was pretty much an alien concept (or at least a novelty delegated to the select few, rather crunchy natural foods stores around the city).
Fast forward to 2011… times have certainly changed:
- Organic Avenue products can be found everywhere from the Southampton summer pop-up shop to Norma Kamali’s website to backstage at NY Fashion Week
- The Whole Foods empire has clearly taken the city by storm and it doesn’t seem to show signs of slowing down anytime soon
- One Lucky Duck (the takeaway arm of Pure Food and Wine restaurant) now has two bustling outposts and is cropping up in other local markets, including Whole Foods
- CLEAN (phenomenal book + program centered around holistic health and nutrition by Dr. Alejandro Junger - highly recommend reading) tops the NYTimes bestseller book list six weeks in a row
- I kid you not, juice cleansing - specifically the BluePrint Cleanse - has become commonplace among the NY finance crowd - and not just among women, we’re talking steak-eating boys here
With all that said, I’ve always been a firm believer that healthy foods and a healthier lifestyle just needed better marketing to compete with the crap that most Americans have come to know and love. It seems like slowly but surely, those brands have started to emerge - and capture the interest of a much broader audience.
Which begs the question - is health the new ‘it’ accessory?
And if so, is it here to stay?
Images courtesy of:
http://www.greenlemonade.com/raw-organic-food/healthy-living-organic-avenue/
http://www.ecorazzi.com/2009/06/16/the-green-picture-gisele-bundchen-is-one-lucky-duck/
