Remember Moon Pies? Now There's Moon Juice

Just about four blocks away from where I'm standing is the original Moon Juice, a 500-foot store that focuses on feeding our bodies and our minds with juices that has coast-to-coast awareness and has already expanded to three locations in the Los Angeles area and a huge ecommerce business, as well as wholesale distribution to other outlets, since opening its doors six years ago. 

Its founder, Amanda Chantal Bacon, has become famous and infamous for foodies, health-and-wellness advocates and their detractors as well. 

Amanda recently told Eater, “I was going to grab the person who had eaten pasta all night and had a hangover and give them a beautiful experience where they would be comfortable, with [staff] really to educate them, and serve them, and not make them feel ostracized.” And so Moon Juice was born. 

The store, though tiny, has a broad line ranging from vegetable juices to dusts, plant proteins, snacks and other accoutrements. The juices, which sell for around $9 each, are pretty self-explanatory. The “dusts” are herbal supplements designed for specific needs and contain the “most potent organic and wild-crafted herbs, adaptogenic plants and bioactive minerals" that you add to nut milk, coffee, tea or water, and that are designed to help revitalize you after travel, make you more beautiful or smarter, make your dreams more delightful, and ignite and excite your sexy energy – of course, that one is called sex dust. 

While it may seem like 1960s hippie talk, this is far from that culture. This is a big and growing business. Bacon has an education from the New England Culinary Institute and spent a decade working in kitchens like Chez Panisse, Lucques and Canele, under Alice Waters. She's also working with the Food and Drug Administration to add approved claims to Moon Juice's packaging. 

 “We have a really big kitchen and a really big crew,” Bacon told Eater of Moon Juice’s Culver City commissary — just not big enough anymore. In addition to growing numbers in-store and in the ecommerce shop, the wholesale business is robust enough that “we just couldn’t keep up.” 

Moon Juice’s secret weapon seems to be is its snack and pantry business. Under Cosmic Provisions, Moon Juice offers food products like Rainbow Juice & Seed Crisps, schisandra cacao papaya, vegan protein powder derived from activated brown rice, bulk oats and nuts, and powdered herbs and spices. 

While it might sound like a stretch to add these or similar products to your shelves, it isn’t if you want to capture the generation -- and its dollars -- that's looking for the next Whole Foods.