Known for their cold-pressed juices, homegrown brand A Juicery now operates under new management, and has recently rebranded their retail store. Named Sugarfin, the café has extended operating hours and added new menu items like smoothie bowls and cocktails.
A Juicery was founded by Audrey Teh and Lee Suyi, who started their own juicing outfit with a decidedly local point of view. Stymied by the lack of kale and collard greens that US hipsters have been sucking in for good health, and after receiving a Norwalk for her birthday last year – it’s the machine synonymous with juicing – Teh learnt that local fruits and veggies pack their own benefits. ‘I found out that all the recipes from the States asked for really expensive and hard-to-find vegetables in Singapore,’ she recalls. ‘I realised we had a lot of local and regional produce we could use, and so we did.’
Instead of feeding hyped-up, exotic-to-these-climes superfoods into a hydraulic press juicer at their industrial kitchen, the pair worked with a food scientist pal, Julia Lee, to experiment with tropical fruits and vegetables plucked from around the region.
The result is a core range of 13 juices ($10/bottle) that carefully balance kai lan, chye sim, sweet potato leaves and bok choy with lotus root, watercress, turmeric, water chestnut and lemongrass. The produce is picked up at Pasir Panjang Wholesale Market and juiced to order to slowly chip away at our ‘international good, local bad’ biases. And, indeed, regionally grown does seem better. We’re generally not fans of having our veggies chewed up and spat out as a green sludge that hippie cleansers call juice, but they work for Teh – who still doesn’t eat her greens – and are yummy enough for us to gulp down by the bottle. To good health.
Order online at ajuicery.com.