Photos by: @JonesPhotography
Something was strangely abuzz outside the storefront of proprietor Amber Sowers’ ReU Juicery Troy location (5 E Main St.) back in early 2022. As Sowers recalls: “All these bees just showed up in a massive swarm. It was incredible. Like nothing else I’d ever seen before.”
Spellbound by the hovering bees clouding the front outer area of her building, Sowers rushed to her phone, took a few pictures of the anomalous occurrence, and posted the images on social media to share her wonderment with any and all interested.
Evidently, quite a lot of interest there was.
As Sowers (pictured below) continued in her recollection of the peculiar incident: “The social media post immediately led to a new relationship with a local honey vendor. And now we get 55-gallon buckets of honey from New Carlisle-based Golden Queen Honey. What an amazing experience!”
Such fortuitous moments have remained a vital element of ReU Juicery’s steady growth, bolstered by local community connections such as that with Golden Queen Honey throughout Sowers’ decade-long journey into offering cold press juices and healthful vittles to the public.
It was in the late aughts that Sowers, a longtime cog in “corporate America,” realized that she needed to make some dramatic shifts in her lifestyle choices. Both for her family and herself.
“I was having problems with my health,” Sowers disclosed. “And I was seeing things in my children that caused concern, too.”
It wasn’t until “things started to go wrong” that Sowers connected what she was putting into her body to how she was feeling on a day-to-day basis. She then began what would become a lifelong process of educating herself to the visceral joys of healthy juicing and eating.
Sowers calls her having enrolled in online classes through the New York-based Institute for Integrative Nutrition “the best thing I could’ve ever done. I was doing it at first for myself and family, and then after all the positive effects it was having on us all, I thought, ‘Oh, my god: I love juicing! I need to share this with everyone!’”
Combining her passion for “connecting people to taking responsibility for their health and eating more ‘clean, whole’ foods” with her entrepreneurial savvy gained from her time in the corporate world, Sowers began selling her cold press juices, salads, and smoothie bowls from a tent she would prop up at various area festivals and public events such as Garden Station’s EarthFest.
From there, ReU Juicery bloomed into a food truck-based business, followed by a brick-and-mortar location at 3 E. Main St. in 2017 before finally finding its larger, current home a year later. And there ReU Juicery has resided for the past five years, with a Tipp City location having opened up inside Schulte Wellness (1928 Donn Davis Way) in May of 2022.
“Along with our physical expansion, I wanted to also be able to build up the menu to offer more food options,” Sowers says.
“As with our cold press juices, I’m very, very careful about food sourcing. I do my best to choose organic when we can, local when we can. This has helped us to create and maintain a lot of local relationships where we get the best in things like sweet potatoes, kale, and rainbow char from nearby farmers.”
Other such regional farming connections include those with Troy’s own Sugar Grove Maple and Fort Recovery’s Our Fathers Foods whose maple syrup and rolled oats, respectively, allowed Sowers to conjure up a recipe for granola so delectable that she’s recently begun selling it in bags for customers who had been requesting the fresh, local heartiness beyond in-store visits.
“We’re educating palettes,” Sowers says. “It’s about making the taste of ‘real food’ like what we provide accessible and something people will be craving, because they’ll realize how much their body really needs organic ingredients locally sourced and without chemicals or additives.”
With a sly, cherubic grin, Sowers knowingly acknowledges that “some people look at our green juices and go, ‘Oh, that’s weird!’ But, to me, it’s weird to eat fake food that’s made in a lab so that it’ll taste good. And then we wonder why we’re all feeling so anxious, why we’re getting so sick all of the time. We’re not supporting our bodies and giving them the nutrients they need.”
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Sowers and her twenty-person staff at ReU Juicery hope that in continuing to expand throughout the local community, they can bring more congregants to the fold – those who will begin through such mindful eating and drinking to “listen to their own internal guidance system.”
“That’s where this is all going,” Sowers concludes. “Helping people tune into their own individual bodies. So that when people ask me, ‘What should I get?’ I can answer, ‘Well, what do you think is right for you?’”
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Learn more about the business at reujuicery.com. Follow them on Facebook HERE.