Squeeze Juicery Pops Up in LoHi for the Summer

Owning a pop-up cold-pressed juice window is a journey that Brendan Fung didn't see himself embarking on in the past. “I was never really into juicing — I found it to be kind of inaccessible, in that it was expensive and everything came in glass bottles, and it was kind of an unobtainable product for me,” he explains. “I’m a vegetarian, so it feels like something that would have been in my wheelhouse, but it wasn’t.”

However, a trip to Sayulita, Mexico, changed everything for the Denver entrepreneur.

“Instead of coffee in the morning, what they would do is they would basically have these little juice windows along the street, and people would come and congregate,” Fung recalls. “It became such an interesting community of people that would get together every morning.”

Fung says he “fell in love” with the idea of a community coming together every morning to kick-start their day with a healthy beverage, though he couldn’t find anything similar in Denver once he returned. Unable to find a juice window that fostered the kind of community he was looking for, Fung started making his own juice at home, which led to making juice for friends.

Eventually, the owners of Kobe An, a LoHi Japanese restaurant at 3400 Osage Street, offered to let Fung operate Squeeze Juicery out of their restaurant, prepping juice on the joint’s bar and serving it from a walk-up window in the hours before the restaurant opened.

After a year of operating, Fung noticed that his juice — which is made with local produce — “resonated” with people in the area. He now operates on a seasonal basis, meaning Squeeze can be found occupying Kobe An’s space in the mornings from April through September.

“I believe in this idea of enjoying things when you’re meant to enjoy them,” he explains, noting that fresh, cold-pressed juice is a product best served on sunnier, warmer days. "You’re meant to enjoy it when it’s warm; you get it when it’s warm and when it’s cold. It just isn’t for the season.”

Fung says he’s been told by others that operating seasonally might not be the best way to optimize his business, but he feels it better aligns with his personal mission. “I really do it as this community thing,” he notes. “I’m trying to create this beautiful thing around juice and less so around business.”

Fung’s menu includes juices for $9, wellness shots for $2 and overnight oats — a new addition to the menu this year — for $6. Alongside the standard handcrafted menu items is a rotating juice of the month, with 15 percent of proceeds from sales of that juice going to a local non-profit. In his 2021 season, Fung says he “raised about $1,200 for four different nonprofits.”

As for his goal of bringing people together through his juice business, Fung says that most mornings, he sees the same people gathering. “It’s become such an enjoyable community of people,” he gushes.

Squeeze Juicery is located at 3400 Osage Street and is open from 8 a.m. to 2 p.m. Wednesday through Sunday. For more information, visit squeezejuicery.co.