Tallinn - How appetizing does a drink of liquefied grass clippings sound?
The health craze of wheat grass juice has swept across most western countries over the past decade, but somehow it left the Baltics untouched.
Now an Australian-based company is hoping to convince Estonians that drinking wheat grass cuttings isn't as unpalatable as it sounds. Like most things untasty, it's actually quite healthy.
Wheat grass arrives in Tallinn
There's a tray of bright green grass sitting on the bar. It looks quite out of place in the slick surroundings 's we are standing around a pool at City Spa, Tallinn's newest and flashiest private health club, where membership starts at 60,000 kroons a month. Thankfully they let me in for free. I'm at the press launch of Boost Juice, a chain of low-fat juice and smoothie bars that is about to set up shop in Estonia.
All eyes are on the grass as it is cut from it's bed of potting mixture and fed through a juicer. It smells like the backyard on a Saturday afternoon after dad's been mowing. The juicer grunts and grumbles and feeds out a trickle of thick, dark green liquid.
It's poured into small shot-sized cups and passed around the pool edge, accompanied by a slice of orange. We're encouraged to slug back the shot and suck on the fruit 's just like tequila, but without the salt. Or the hangover.
"One shot of wheat grass is the same as eating a big bowl full of leafy green vegetables," Boost Juice's marketing manager from Australia tells me. I haven't read the science behind that claim, but I know that anything that tastes bad must be good for me. Wheat grass is a little acrid and earthy, but it's not the worst thing to hit my taste buds. Thanks to the orange slice chaser, it's quite imaginable that someone could swallow a shot each morning.
So just what is the stuff we're drinking? It's the same plant that ends up in your bread and cereal. It's wheat, grown in small trays for just a few days until it's a few centimeters high, then cut with scissors and pulped through a juicer. According to its proponents, it contains a host of vitamins and antioxidants that boost your energy and cleanse out your system. It's often claimed that drinking wheat grass juice is like consuming "sunshine" because it's nearly pure chlorophyll (and ask a ninth grade biology student what that is, if you can't remember).
Wealth and health
"I have a shot of wheat grass every day on my way to work," one recently arrived Australian told me. He used to frequent juice bars, which can be found on every street corner in inner-city areas of Australia and the U.S. The juice bar craze is now sweeping the U.K, and 's if Boost Juice has its way - the Baltics and Scandinavia.
Like other "healthy lifestyle" franchises, Boost Juice is spawning its way across the planet. Economic models suggest that affluent societies become concerned about health when they reach a certain stage of development. Which is why the sandwich chain Subway now has nearly as many stores as McDonalds worldwide. With their skyrocketing salaries, Estonians are eager to channel their disposable incomes into healthy products instead of junk food.
Two Australians of Estonian heritage are behind the push to bring Boost Juice to the Baltics. Robert Tohver and Rudi Tuisk were both familiar with the juice bar concept from back home, and realized there was a gaping hole in the market here. They teamed up with champion Estonian swimmer Indrek Sei, who gave their team a bit of local celebrity appeal. They are now weeks away from opening their first store in Tallinn's Kristiine Keskus shopping center.
They sell more than just wheat grass, of course, and it's their low-fat smoothies that seem to be the most popular. At the same taste-testing event, the berry and banana smoothies made from frozen yogurt were a huge hit. Tuisk predicts the biggest challenge will be convincing people their drinks really are healthy. "The problem is they taste too good," Tuisk said.
That's not so much a problem with the wheat grass shot, though. Given Estonia's propensity to pick up western trends, wheat grass could just become the hippest thing to hit town since Nordic walking poles.
