A year ago, Delhi-based sisters Nadia Singh Bahl and Carol Singh started the ‘juice-cleanse revolution’ in India with their company Antidote. The timing was perfect. Young brides-to-be were looking for that magic potion for a perfect wedding glow. The rest, guilty of binging on sweets through the festive season, were willing to try anything to flatten tummies and squeeze into lehengas.

For the uninitiated, cold-pressed juice is wildly popular in the West, apparently consumed by children as young as six. In the past year, the trend has trickled into India, Mumbai and Delhi, in particular. Makers claim it’s healthier than packaged juices, even homemade fruit and vegetable juices that lose nutrients due to heat generated by the blades of a blender.

Much like Antidote, Anuj Rakyan’s Raw Pressery in Mumbai got off to a flying start in January this year. So much so that by 2015, he hopes to make the juices available pan-India. Raw Pressery already delivers freshly-pressed juices to customers’ doorstep. Its most extreme diet at the moment is the Raw Cleanse package, which involves skipping regular meals and surviving an entire day on six bottles of juice. Rakyan says young women are early converts; and the FAQs are ‘How fast can I lose weight?’ and ‘How do I get glowing skin?’ Rakyan does, however, get orders from women in their 50s and 60s, but it takes more effort to convince them that the juice they’ve been making at home for decades isn’t as healthy as they thought.

In the course of the year, several other companies offering juice cleanses have cropped up to cash in on the trend — JustPressed in Delhi and Juicifix in Mumbai are among them.

As for those who think this is a passing fad that will die out when people tire of paying ₹150 for a bottle of vegetable juice, or discover another trend that promises the same results, Rakyan has a simple retort: “Anything related to a healthy life can’t be transient. Cold-pressed juice will soon replace tetrapacks in all markets.”

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