Alex Outar
Elizabeth Permaul
Zaihong Shi
St. John's University
Charles Wankel
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Mother Earth Juice Bar & Health Food Store works toward the third UN Sustainable Development Goal of “Good Health and Well Being” by providing various means of improving one’s lifestyle and health management opportunities, all compacted into one storefront. Customers can enjoy freshly made juices, smoothies, and Caribbean cuisine while browsing a wide selection of loose teas, roots, hemp milk, essential oils, calcium, and countless other health products. Furthermore, Dr. Lord offers personalized naturopathic health consultations including, but not limited to, pH balancing, iridology, weight management, and total body cleanses.
The innovation this business, Mother Earth Juice Bar & Health Food Store, presents is cultivated through the combination of juices, extensive health food items, and health management services. Particularly, Dr. Lord explains that many people are mineral deficient and are simply not aware that “mineral deficiency is the beginning of all disease.” By the same token, these juices provide essential vitamins and minerals that the human body requires in order to function at maximum efficiency. Some of these include manganese, magnesium, calcium, and fiber. Furthermore, Dr. Lord states that “we are in a society where our food is not mineral rich.” This can be attributed to the organic movement, which by USDA standard promotes fruits and vegetables that are pesticide-free. However, these same products may be mineral-free as well if the soil and fertilizer used is not rich in minerals. For this reason, these juices are an integral part of the business and the most popular offering in this establishment. Due to the astounding demand, Dr. Lord has never had an issue with these perishable goods overnight.
The Mother Earth Juice Bar also offers all-natural ingredients such as hyssop, mineral drinks, chaga mushrooms, yarrow, and nettle, each bearing its own unique health properties. Dr. Lord also recently participated in the New Life Expo in March 2018, where she met many other health-conscious individuals and offered her consultation services. By doing so, Dr. Lord is attempting to educate people on how to embrace healthier lifestyles.
Dr. Lord was inspired to create this business due to her background in ministry, humanities, and naturopathy. After learning about the innumerable benefits of all-natural remedies, she was motivated to share this knowledge and promote a paradigm shift toward healthy living. “I’ve found that there are herbs, and plants, and minerals, that people do not know that their bodies need, and it can totally prevent big diseases, and big surgeries you know, and death.”
In other words, “the whole movement is to get people back to the Earth, to nature,” says Dr. Lord. Through her business venture, she aims to educate all on natural health treatments, which can help defeat genetic/hereditary diseases and extend lifespans. Dr. Lord specifically notes that our nation spends the “most in healthcare, but yet we rank very low on the list of healthy nations.” She references an automobile needing an oil change: “your body needs an oil change every 3 months” in order to clean itself out and eliminate any parasites or toxins and prevent the body from breaking down.
More than just acting as a retailer for health products and drinks, Dr. Lord’s business actively works toward ensuring healthy living and promotes well-being for people of all ages. Specifically, she specializes in preventive medicine such as iridology, which gauges the health of one’s organs by examining one’s eyes. Dr. Lord advocates that “if you do certain things now, you don’t have to get surgery later.”
Mother Earth Juice Bar & Health Food Store officially opened for business in 2017, and until now it has impacted the community on various levels. To begin, it provides the immediate community with healthy food options. Dr. Lord offers varying food combinations with appropriate calories and adequate nutrition. Second, this business offers health consultations and a wide selection of herbs that, when used properly, help relieve a plethora of health problems. To take one product as an example, the Tea of Life herb supports healthy blood glucose levels, which can be beneficial for past or current smokers.
The long-term impact this business hopes to achieve is to educate the American people about healthy alternatives, lifestyle changes, and all-natural disease prevention techniques. In fact, Dr. Lord asserts that approximately half of her current sales are from repeat customers, whilst the other half are from new customers curious about what this health food store has to offer. Additionally, Dr. Lord aims to revitalize humans’ connection with Mother Earth despite our young people’s attachment to gadgets, technology, and video games.
Two years prior to the opening of official storefront operations in 2017, Dr. Lord started training, perfecting her recipes, and planning to open a business in which individuals could learn about healthy living and take time to “reset their body” by reconnecting with Mother Nature. With all of her training in health-related endeavors, Dr. Lord earned enough capital to start at this prime location near Forest Park. With the assistance of her husband and daughter, she now employs about seven employees, utilizes a beautiful webpage introducing her products (with a new site on the way), and expanded her business online, allowing customers to place orders through Yelp or Uber Eats. Revenue is driven by both repeat and new customers.
Dr. Lord envisions future growth of her business as pertaining to frequent retreats in which customers can experience different health treatments in a short period of time. Previously, Dr. Lord held a retreat with 4 rooms, but she is now aiming for space for 10. She is considering building a Customer Relationship System to maintain and promote customer loyalty. Likewise, she is looking for a dedicated marketing agency to further build her brand, Mother Earth. She commented that Mother Earth Juice Bar is not just a restaurant/health store; as the business grows bigger, it will greatly benefit the community and society as a whole.
This innovation benefits society mainly through its health products, services, and overall education. Dr. Lord is a certified Naturopath and has extensive knowledge about health foods, nutrition, and beneficial herbal remedies for the body. She shares her advice with customers and openly makes suggestions to help heal any ailments they may be suffering from. In turn, this helps people avoid doctor visits and succumbing to high medical bills, as the alternative is to pursue the natural route of preventative medicine. Prescription drugs oftentimes harm the body in the long run.
Not only do the herbal products contribute to the health of society, but the food she makes does as well. From smoothies and juices to fresh, home-cooked-style meals, each product has high nutritional value and contributes to the wellness of and supports a better lifestyle for her customers.
Dr. Lord’s business also benefits the environment, as the society we live in is not as focused on health as we once were. Her goal is to bring people back to Earth and Mother Nature, supporting the realization that one’s health remedy may be growing right in their backyard. Dr. Lord wants to create an oasis for people to get away from the hustle and bustle of city life and instead focus solely on health restoration. She is in the process of creating an official retreat upstate that allows guests to unwind and experience all that nature has to offer.
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Dr. Roxanne Simone Lord, Business Owner
Mother Earth Juice Bar & Health Food Store is a local business in the Queens, New York, area dedicated to providing healthy alternatives and lifestyle choices to the surrounding community. This business offers fruit- and vegetable-based drinks, herbs, vitamin products, items from local farms upstate, and even delicious Caribbean dishes. Above all, Dr. Lord is motivated to educate all on the benefits of purely natural health remedies and, in connection with her business, is working on subsidizing a series of health retreats promoting ozone therapy, mineral baths, and sauna detoxing, tentatively set for release in summer 2018.