Taking her best shot

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This article was published 24/10/2020 (2186 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

For years, Agata Robb has driven to her 91-year-old grandfather’s home in the North End on a weekly basis to check up on him and to discuss whatever is going on in their individual lives.

During one such visit about 14 months ago, the married mother of two and founder of Juice Me, a five-year-old venture that turns out all-natural, nutritional products, let on that she was feeling a bit overwhelmed, as though she was being pulled in “10 different directions.”

Her grandfather expressed concern, inquiring why that was the case. She reiterated to him that while her self-run biz started solely as a cold-pressed juice company, it had since grown to include a food truck-type operation, a line of flavoured teas as well as so-called “super shots,” which are frozen cubes prepared with a variety of healthful ingredients such as ginger and turmeric that can be added to hot water, smoothies or carbonated soda to offer flavour, or to help stave off coughs and colds.

“I told him I’d been so busy trying to grow my little company into something big that I didn’t have as much time for my family as I would have liked, and was thinking of scaling things back. But I wasn’t sure if that was a smart move or not,” Robb says, seated in the dining room area of the two-storey abode she shares with her husband Adam, their children Anaya, 13, and Adam Jr., 11, and a 10-month-old husky-cross that answers to Stevie.

Her grandfather, who moved to Winnipeg from his native Poland in 1984, took her by the hand and said, “You know, if you eat with a little spoon, you will never go hungry.” She told him he was 100 per cent right and, heeding his words, rebranded Juice Me around this time last year, by focusing exclusively on her “little shots.”

“I can’t even tell you what a difference it’s made, not just for my business but for my state of mind,” she says. “If his wasn’t the best piece of advice anybody’s ever given me, I don’t know what is.”

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Like her grandfather, Robb (nee Osciak) was born in Poland. She was four years old in 1988 when her family emigrated from Jamno, a farming community near the Baltic Sea, to Winnipeg.

“My grandmother, my dad’s mom, died of a brain aneurysm when I was one,” she explains. “My dad flew to Winnipeg as soon as she got sick and after she passed, he and my mother thought it would be better if the four of us – I have an older brother — came here to help support my grandpa.”

For the longest time, Robb was never “too big” on juice. That all changed in January 2015 when, during a family trip to Cabo San Lucas in Mexico, they rented a car and drove to a neighbouring village for the day. While sightseeing they encountered a woman selling fresh-squeezed juice out of what Robb describes as “basically a hole in the wall.” Forget the humble setting: after giving the woman’s product a try, Robb declared she had never tasted anything as good.

“For the rest of the trip I talked obsessively about her juice and was still talking about it after we’d returned home,” Robb says with a chuckle. “One morning my husband jokingly said, ‘OK, you’re driving us all nuts with this juice thing. What do you have in mind, exactly?’ That’s around when I ordered a very basic, cold-pressed juicer and began experimenting with different things: apple, so the kids would drink it, and greens like spinach, cucumber and kale for my husband and me.”

At the time, Robb was employed as a mediator for couples going through marital problems. Except as she got more adept at juicing, and became more and more enthused with what she was making, Adam, whom she describes as “ridiculously encouraging,” turned to her one night and said, “You know, if this something you might want to pursue, we have a bit of savings, let’s go for it.” A few days later she gave her notice at work.

Like she said, Juice Me began as a cold-pressed juice operation. Except when Robb was preparing juices such as orange, lemon and beet in those first couple of years, she often had leftovers, which she would drain into ice cube trays, telling herself she’d use them “for something, one day.” In time, whenever she felt a cold coming on, she’d pop a cube out of the tray, usually one containing ginger, and together with lemon and honey, add it to a cup of boiling water.

“Cold medications have never sat well with me — they give me an anxious feeling — but anytime I had one of my ginger shots, it kicked a cold right in the butt,” she says. Soon, she was offering the frozen shots to friends and family who had the sniffles and almost to a person they told her, “Agata, you should be selling these, too.”

Robb currently markets five “everyday” flavours of shots through her website (www.juiceme.ca) as well as seasonal concoctions such as cranberry and lemon-lime. Since having their backyard garage licensed as a commercial kitchen, Juice Me has turned into a true family affair with everybody pitching in, she says. Both children help with packing and deliveries while Adam, who likes to boast he scored two points higher on his food handler’s exam than his wife, slices, dices… whatever needs doing, she says.

“Even my mom comes over once a week to lend a hand,” Robb says. “And the best thing about having our kitchen in the backyard is there’s nothing stopping me from going to work in PJs.”

Juice Me products are available at several retail locations, including Vita Health, Generation Green and Pennyweight Market in Beausejour. The owners of Black Market Provisions, 550 Osborne St., don’t just carry Robb’s wares, they’re committed customers, to boot.

“We are big fans, we drink them daily at home,” says Alana Fiks, who co-owns the attractive, 19-month-old shop with her partner Angela Farkas. “We are now hard-core shot takers and take them thawed, straight up like a shooter, but in the winter I also drink them as a hot tea.”

Fiks, who knows a thing or two about frozen goods herself (before opening their store she and Farkas ran Pop Cart, Winnipeg’s first gourmet frozen-treat pushcart), says every so often somebody will eye Robb’s packaged shots in the freezer and ask what they are, exactly.

“The odd time customers will ask us how you use them, but for the most part they are already devout clients who drink them regularly,” she says.

The day before we sat down with Robb, the world lost singer Helen Reddy, a Grammy Award winning singer who had No. 1 hit in 1973 with the country ballad Delta Dawn. The reason we bring that up is that when Robb is asked about a scripted line on her packaging which reads, “proudly woman owned,” she tells the story of how, whenever she’s having an especially busy day, her husband sings one of Reddy’s greatest hits to her, as encouragement.

“He’ll look at me and go, ‘I am woman, hear me roar in numbers too big to ignore,’” she says, referring to Reddy’s I Am Woman, a song that became an anthem in the early 1970s for the women’s liberation movement. “By having that written on each of my boxes is a nod to myself and to all the women out there who want to pursue their dream. I don’t care what people say; it is tougher for a woman to launch a business and succeed on her own merits, so putting that on the packaging serves as a little bit of empowerment, and a personal reminder that I was able to achieve my goal.”

david.sanderson@freepress.mb.ca