First, there was
Zuka Juice, started by some
enterprising BYU students. They introduced a
revolutionary concept -- a chain that actually used
real ingredients to make comestibles, fruit
smoothies, in this case. They actually had
real strawberries and
real mangoes and
real oranges that they juiced in a spiffy machine to make
orange juice. They advertised "fresh-squeezed" on the front window; although this is usually a
corporate lie (or at least unverifiable), you knew they weren't lying because they were juicing oranges right before your eyes! It was
incredible. I believe the business started in
Salt Lake City, Utah, and then moved throughout the Southwest.
Recently (late 1999?) Zuka Juice was bought by Jamba Juice, a similar chain built on the same concept. Although all the posters and leaflets said that the same quality would be kept up despite the merger, I have not found that to be true. I no longer frequent the place, and now I have to drink Mountain Dew instead of tasty, healthy fruit drinks.
Zuka/Jamba Juice has a health-food/pseudotribal theme. Their drinks had names like "Lime Sublime", "Mango Mango", and "The Cold Warrior", which contained 2000% of your daily requirement for Vitamin C. Most of the drinks are made with orange juice as the base -- they get juice from their juicing machine, put it in a blender with ice, frozen fruit, and sometimes sherbet, and blend it up. Zuka had a few drinks that weren't based on fruit (like coffee or nonfat milk), but they were predominantly a smoothie joint.
In keeping with the faddish health-kick business, Jamba Juice will add a "booster" to your drink free of charge (additional boosters cost some $0.99 or something). These include ginseng, creatine, wheatgrass juice, and so on.
To Sum Up: If it had actually kept Zuka's quality standards, this place would have continued to be the godsend to the city of Tucson that it was. In the blistering 110+ degree-F heat of our wretched summers, Zuka Juice was the place to go. Real fruit juices (unadulterated by high fructose corn syrup) are hard to find these days.
The other problem with Jamba Juice in Tucson is that they are in very inconvenient locations: one almost in Marana and the other near Sabino Canyon -- neither of these locations are very compatible with working or living in the actual city. Oh well.