Founder Profile: Pure Green Franchise

After owning, operating and consulting for high-end health clubs and fitness brands, I came to two major points of realization:

•  I realized that 80% of optimal health comes from nutrition while only 20% comes from fitness. 
• I experienced all the challenges of operating a 40,000 square foot health clubs and saw the massive potential for scalability of the 500 square foot juice bar model.

My passion has always been focused on making people healthier but the points above drove me to create Pure Green.

 I founded the first Pure Green retail location in October of 2014 in New York City with the mission of Pure Green is to build healthier communities around the world by connecting people with superfoods. 

In 2016, I started Pure Green’s wholesale division which now services thousands of accounts through dozens of distributors, hundreds of high-end hotels and dozens of professional sports teams. 

With five locations open in New York City, one of the most competitive cities in the world, 3 locations in construction in Florida, 3 locations in construction in Chicago, Pure Green is on pace to have 50 signed franchises by the end of this year.

The use of funds from our equity crowdfunding campaign will mainly be used on marketing to attract new franchisees into our pipeline. The marketing use of funds consists of building organic SEO for puregreenfranchise.com, sponsored ads on social media, retargeting and marketing funnels to ensure we are attracting highly qualified franchisees.

With the aftermath of the coronavirus, we foresee there will be a high availability of commercial real estate which we allow for favorable terms for our corporately owned locations and for our franchisees. We also plan to use funds to build 3 to 6 new corporately owned locations.

Aside from our handcrafted and made-to-order superfood smoothies, our menu includes made-to-order acai bowls, pitaya bowls, cold-pressed juice, and cold-pressed shots.

Pure Green has two separate divisions:

• Our Retail / Franchise Division which owns our corporately owned locations in New York City and includes our entire franchise business. We have a master franchise structure with 100+ franchise unit operators set-up as sub-franchisors for rapid growth. 

• Our Wholesale Division has a presence in over 30 states with thousands of accounts and sells the cold-pressed juice and shots to Pure Green franchisees.

There are other juice bar franchises that have very high start-up costs for franchisees averaging $400,000 to $500,000 for a single franchise unit. It only costs on average $150,000 to open a Pure Green franchise location.

We achieve such a low start-up cost by leveraging our wholesale division which sells the cold-pressed juice and shots to our franchisees for less than it would cost them to manufacture it themselves. This avoids the need for our franchisees to purchase expensive juicing equipment and building out production facilities and also lowers the cost of labor.

Like most other businesses, a global pandemic is always the biggest risk. With the onset of the coronavirus and state mandates put in place with businesses, continuing to operate during this time has presented a unique set of challenges including creating a safe environment for both guests and team members. 

Pure Green is considered an essential business and we are fortunate that we have been able to continue to operate by staying open for delivery and takeout. We have been able to double our delivery business during this time and our immunity cold-pressed juice shots business has increased by 1000x since March 1st.  

We are one of the only juice bar franchises that has a master franchise structure for rapid growth and wholesale business with national distribution. We believe that these factors are our secret weapon. 

We formulate all of our products to have an unparalleled taste and high-performance nutrition. We believe that our combination of taste and nutrition is unrivaled.

The economics of our franchise structure is as follows. 

Pure Green franchisees pay us:

We collect a one-time  franchise fee of $30,000 per unit

We collect a 6% royalty of gross revenue

We collect a 2% of gross revenue for our national marketing fee

Our goal is to get to 500mm in revenue with 25% EBITDA as quickly as possible. We have been approached by several VC and private equity groups that are health and wellness-focused that have their eye on us and will most likely make offers well before we get to that point. We may choose to IPO along the way. With our exit in mind, we are strategically building an influential board of advisors that will help to steer us in the right direction. We believe that after things settle back to normal post-coronavirus there will be a massive opportunity for us to expand.