When a multilevel marketing company tells you exactly what its core product line is in its name, it’s pretty convenient. Except in the case of Juice Plus, the company isn’t really about juice—it’s more focused on powdered concentrates from fruits and vegetables.
In other words, it’s “better” than juice, which contains a lot of sugar and no fiber. Hence, the name.
Juice plus is famous for its “One Simple Challenge” to improve your lifestyle, as well as its its Children’s Health Study, which it proudly trumpets as proof of the healthy lifestyle changes that come about by using Juice Plus and adopting their recommended lifestyle changes.
Did I get on board? This explains everything:
When it comes to popularity, Juice Plus has been trending well for several years. Its zenith in terms of popularity was midway through 2014, but even today, search engine traffic is only down by about 25%.
As with many lifestyle change network marketing products, Juice Plus trends upward every year right around New Year’s. The reason? People making New Year’s resolutions to eat better and live a healthy lifestyle.
Taking advantage of this surge in interest could be useful in your business strategy if you become a Juice Plus distributor.
Products
In terms of its core product line, Juice Plus’ offerings are really quite limited. There are a few varieties of their Juice Plus blend (a garden blend, an orchard blend, and a vineyard blend, each with different proportions of fruits and vegetables), plus an energy bar and some single-serve flavored drinks.
If you want to be successful as a distributor for Juice Plus, your mission is clear: you’ve got to focus on their core product.
Fortunately, there’s a lot of information about it, both from the company and from independent scientific resources.
The marketing angle of Juice Plus is to offer their Orchard blend capsules as “the next best thing” as fruits, and their Garden blend as the next best thing to vegetables.
The Orchard blend contains concentrates from both common and rare fruits: apple, beet, acerola cherry, papaya, prunes, and dates, to name just a few.
These are accompanied by a combination of flavonoids and other useful isolates, like carotenes. It also contains the probiotic bacteria strain Lactobacillus acidophilus.
The Garden blend contains a similar range of ingredients: concentrates from carrot, parsley, broccoli, spinach, kale, and garlic, among others. Like the Orchard blend, the Garden blend contains a similar blend of useful extracts and active Lactobacillus acidophilus bacteria cultures.
The Vineyard blend, which is a focused “red” or superfood berry-based capsule, contains ingredients from blueberries, grapes, raspberries, and other dark-colored fruits which are known for their powerful antioxidant effects.
The good news for the budding Juice Plus distributor is that there is a ton of clinical research you can refer to when it comes to the benefits of the product. While the company touts the self-reported benefits of their Children’s Heath Study, this isn’t an independent, well-controlled inquiry into health behaviors. Independent researchers have focused on the direct biological benefits of taking Juice Plus.
A 2009 study published in the International Journal of Food Sciences and Nutrition found that a 28-day supplementation routine that used Juice Plus was able to increase the circulating levels of two antioxidants, beta carotene and alpha tocopherol.
These circulating compounds have been hypothesized to be related to the reduced risk of heart disease and cancer that is associated with a higher dietary intake of fruits and vegetables.
So, the researchers concluded that the Juice Plus supplementation routine was a beneficial health intervention for the subjects in their study.
A similar study at the University of South Carolina found that a 60 day supplementation routine of Juice Plus reduced the systemic inflammatory load in a 117 subject placebo controlled trial.
The subjects’ whole body inflammation was estimated by checking blood levels of chemicals that correlate with inflammation, which is of course associated with diseases like obesity, metabolic syndrome, and cardiovascular disease, just to name a few.
The researchers saw a substantial drop in circulating levels of blood markers of inflammation over the course of the study when comparing the Juice Plus supplement group to the placebo group. They concluded, similar to the other study, that taking a fruit and vegetable concentrate supplement like Juice Plus could have long term health benefits.
It should be noted that this research has been criticized by other scientists and commentators for conflicts of interest—many of the authors have financial ties to the company itself.
Compensation plan
Given the wide range of science behind Juice Plus’ products, it should be a fairly easy sell. But what’s the money angle look like for you?
To become a distributor, you need to pay a $50 “application fee” and be accepted. You also undergo some basic online training from their marketing team.
As a basic distributor, you’re only eligible for retail profit from buying at wholesale prices and selling at retail prices.
To earn commission, you need to become a Direct Distributor, which you can accomplish by enrolling five customers over a 30 day timespan. Enrolling more customers enables you to earn higher commission rates, from 6% ranging up to 22%.
Recap
Juice Plus has a solid product if you’re a believer in fruit and vegetable concentrates, and there is a good range of science behind its efficacy (though it’s not without criticism).
The compensation plan is okay, but not great. The absence of an income disclosure statement makes it tough to gauge what your earnings could look like, but the good news is that the core product is easy to sell on a regular basis: since it focuses on long-term health, your customers would take it year-round for the long term.
So if you’re set on MLM, it’s not terrible, but probably not the best, either.
If you’re doing it for the money, there are better ways to kill your day job. You might like our coaching because it shows you the good life without peddling overpriced juice to your family and friends.
http://bodynutrition.org/juice-plus-review/
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