impulse juice, The Twin Cities' Best Juice Shop, is Closing November 8th.
What that means for juice at large and an ode to impulse juice.
It may seem strange to people that one of the first stops I made when I moved home to Minneapolis after six years on the East Coast was a juice shop called impulse juice co. What food writer stops at a juice shop?
There’s a lot of layers to answer that question, but one of them is that I used to work in juice and really love juice. Another is that anyone who eats a lot of restaurant food and has any sense chugs green juice in the morning. Food critics all over the country practice this ritual to prepare for days full of steak and deep-fried potatoes.
But the third reason, the most important, is that as a person who has been to almost the entire continental 48 and has drunk juice in cities like New York, Los Angeles, and Portland, impulse juice is just the best juice I’ve ever found.
So when Brian Nanoff, owner of impulse juice, told me it was closing, it felt like a gut punch.
Brian Nanoff got his start working at Lakewinds co-op, then moved over to Agra Culture at 50th and France. “A buddy called me asking me about opening that juice program,” he said. He took the job. He built that program from scratch in 2014. Agra Culture wanted to be easily franchised and a $26,000 juicer was a barrier to entry for that plan, so they closed the program in 2016. Brian reached out to Truce Juice, advocating for his team, to see if they had space for his staff. This is the first time in this piece you’ll hear that Brian is a real mensch, but it won’t be the last. “They didn’t have space for them,” he said, “But they asked me what I was doing.” He came in as the Kitchen Manager in 2016 and reformatted the menu.
More greens. More balance. More fun. A simple green juice was enhanced with pineapple and mint. New smoothies speckled the menu. Some recipes he inherited, most he invented. Like many food businesses, Truce closed at the end of 2020. Brian didn’t want to see the juice shop at 32nd and Hennepin close, so he signed a lease. The first menu he had was done in Excel because Brian didn’t know how to use a design platform. “I just knew juice,” he said. The logo came from his friend’s old graffiti tag. Look closely at the sign out front and you’ll see the letters mpls in red.
Brian eventually worked up to being the COO at Truce, so when he got the keys, he knew the business wasn’t doing well. He made some changes to try to make it last. Not having waste was a big one. He said, “Waste is a killer.” Now, even with an almost zero waste kitchen, it’s just become harder and harder to stay afloat.
“We’re actually up in sales from last summer because of the construction across Uptown last year,” Brian said, “But we aren’t anywhere close to where we were from 2021-2023.”
Juice is about two pounds of produce on average. Some juices are more (turmeric and ginger have low yields) and some are less (cucumber has a good yield). impulse juice has never skimped on the organic thing, even though many juice shops with the word organic in the name have. Their produce is top notch—no green washing here. Factoring in labor, rent, food costs, and bottles which have gone up 20% in the last four years, Brian told me, “We’re getting about $2 a bottle after our $1 price increase this summer.” That’s less than 20% profit.
With rising costs, juice margins have become thinner than even standard restaurant margins.
Restaurants can shrink their portions and keep prices the same. We’ve all seen it. Pasta now sometimes soars over $30. Steak prices, in many places, have doubled while ounces stay the same. While people grumble about it, they still pay the cost of those dishes. Juice is an allotted number of ounces—and valued less than a cut of beef. If you go from a 16 ounce juice costing $13 to a 12 ounce juice costing $13, people notice. They don’t just notice, they really complain and start to tip less. People don’t see juice as manual labor (it is). They see it as “just another place trying to get me to tip for counter service,” not realizing the effort that goes into making those juices (or that counter service is worthy of tipping).
The first year was the best in tipping for impulse. “During COVID, we were all champions of helping each other out,” Brian said. Then there was a steep decline. Brian pulled up his laptop to show me the raw data during our interview. He showed me the tip percentage for the year 2021. It was about 10-11% of the total volume of sales on an average day. Now, its about 6-7%. “That seems small,” he said, “But it’s not.”
Tipping is really important for juice shops because tips help bridge the gap between what juice should cost and what people are willing to pay. A juice from impulse should cost closer to $15-17 for a 16 ounce juice. But that sticker shock keeps people from coming in the door. Even tipping $1 helps close that margin and keeps juice shops afloat.
Tipping is down everywhere. This is something that I’ve been hearing around the industry, from fine dining to coffee. It was also something that I noticed on Wednesday when I went to grab a smoothie. The man in front of me left the tip screen open, not even choosing the lowest option from impulse juice, which is 9%. I saw this over and over when I stood behind people in line. People just weren’t tipping.
Sure, you could also lament location, location, location when looking at the closure, except so many mornings, Brian watched a line form at neighbor Black Walnut Bakery. That line was often more customers than he would see in a day. The reality is that house made pasta and a steak made by someone in a restaurant are often seen as decidedly different than making those things at home. Same with those incredible, delectable croissants across the street. But juice is harder to sell, no matter how special. You can get it in the grocery aisle, sometimes for under $5 a juice. Juice is readily available on the shelves and mass produced juice has pretty good marketing.
If you can get juice for $5 from Whole Foods or you can get it for $13 at a local shop, why would you choose the more expensive juice?
Lots of juice lovers answer this question with finicky science. They say that every single minute a juice sits, it loses nutrients. Or that pasteurization kills everything off. I’m not that kind of juice person.
My answer to why you get the $13 juice from the juice shop down the road versus the grocery store is that those juices taste better.
We all know that grocery store croissants are not as good as Black Walnut’s. We all know that frozen pizza will never top the best fresh pizza in the country. Boxed mac-n-cheese is a nostalgic delight that can’t stand up next to a five-cheese mac your mother made for Thanksgiving. Even grocery store lattes have a specific chemical taste not found in their barista-made counterparts. But we haven’t applied that same logic to juice.
What I tried to tell people about impulse juice since I moved home is that the juice there is balanced in a way that is special. Most juices are far too sweet, too acidic, or it’s just a mismatch of ingredients you’d never put together in a dish. The best juices include things that you would put in a dish together. They’re liquid plates. That’s impulse.
Most juices are the same regurgitated recipes that you can find in other places. There’s little creativity in them. Often, the recipes are just found online. Going to juice shop after juice shop with a sharp palate means that I can taste the same juice being made over and over in different places. There’s little variation. Maybe lime is swapped with lemon. If they’re being a little spicy, maybe they’ve added in some orange to a green juice.
But impulse juice is exceptionally creative. These are juices you won’t find anywhere else.
The beet juice had chard in it. The impulsive mix, a sliding scale juice that rotates year round, was often a play on viral coffee drinks or dishes.
The dandy lion is a juice that stars dandelion greens and pears, with burdock. The strawberry smoothie had rose water in it. A pineapple smoothie was mixed with peppermint. The oat milk was house made. Even the lemonade program is hyper seasonal. Even the cashew milk includes fun, trending flavors like Matcha. Even the açai bowl toppings are made in house (think strawberry chia jam and house made nut butter). The team even cares enough about their regulars to let you bring in rhubarb from your yard and ask them to juice it, for a small fee (thanks, Brian!). “Cancer patients sometimes came in looking for specific juices,” Brian said. He would make them custom juices, based on what they wanted. Like I said, a real mensch.
A grocery store juice or smoothie is never going to come close to impulse.
Then there’s the savory food, which is relatively new and excellent. In my search to find the best tofu scramble in the Twin Cities, I ended up realizing that there isn’t really a good one. I wish there was, because even though I’m not vegan anymore, I love a good tofu scramble after a week of eating red meat. The best vegan scramble that you can get in the Twin Cities? It’s a cashew scramble (stick with me), made with byproduct cashew pulp from impulse juice. Everyone doubted me when I told them to try it, but then they had one, and they became believers. When I asked him why they were created, Brian said, “No pun intended, but it was a scramble.” He was trying to find a way to make more money in winter. Soup, cashew tacos, and other goodies hit the menu. But people just didn’t come in. “We lost money every day of winter,” he said. For a couple years, he took on a second job.
There’s ingenuity in this little juice shop at the corner of 32nd and Hennepin, ingenuity that we are now losing, because convenience reigns supreme.
The closure is a significant loss for the Twin Cities, but also a significant loss for juice nationally. If impulse juice, one of the best juice shops in the country, can’t stay open, who can?
Every time there is a restaurant, coffee, or bar closure, my advice to people is to go to a place that you really love. Tonight.
The only way to keep our favorite neighborhood spots open is by going to them consistently. The price we pay for local goods like coffee and croissants and juice is not just that we go there, but that we tip and tip well. If we stop going—or we stop tipping—we’ll be fated to get far more than just our juice from the grocery store. Cookies, croissants, and breakfast sandwiches are on the chopping block, too.
impulse juice will stay open until November 8 and I’ll be there getting my favorite smoothie. If you want to go and see what all my fuss is about, order an umber with cold brew and protein, get yourself a cashew taco, and order a goodhue. These three items have been a staple in my breakfast routine since I moved home in 2023. I’m even drinking a goodhue right now.
When Brian told me about the closure, I dusted off my juicer in the basement, put it on my kitchen counter, and told it to be ready in a few months to use. Until then, I’ll be drinking Brian’s creations at impulse juice.
