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Date: 8/30/2022
AMHERST – A new juice café is coming to downtown Amherst.
Kwench Juice Café is a franchise with 17 locations across the U.S. and will open its next location before Oct. 1 under Janice Samson and Chandra Lee. The Amherst location is 19 North Pleasant St., formerly the Glazed donut shop.
Kwench offers organic smoothies, juices, quinoa bowls and other food with locally sourced products. Samson and Lee said they were both looking for something new to take on in their professional life and were interested in becoming involved with a franchise. Samson works in real estate and has been at a bank for around 20 years. Lee is an accounting clerk and health and wellness coach.
“We were just trying to figure out a way we could blend our strengths together and do a business,” Samson said. “We came across Kwench, which is an organic juice franchise. They do smoothies, juices, shots, salads, sandwiches, quinoa bowls for the health-conscious individual that’s looking for something fast and convenient but it’s also healthy for you and nutritious.”
Lee said signing on with Kwench was easy because of her hobby of making similar items for friends and family in her everyday life. The pair said that Kwench’s business model stood out to them with everything locally sourced and being able to engage other local businesses where they live.
“It’s kind of hard just sitting behind a computer all day,” Lee said. “I’m a pretty earthy person, I want to go play in the gardens and do green stuff, not sit behind a computer so it was kind of exciting to find something like this, it’s something I do all the time for my family and I’m really health conscious, I enjoy cooking and feeding people. It’s that Italian side of me and being able to do that with really nutritious, healthy food is just a bonus.”
Samson and Lee were also drawn to the hands-on approach of Kwench’s franchisor, Chris Gregoris. Samson said typical franchises can be a very corporate experience with layers of people to talk to to get certain items set up.
“[Gregoris] has been great in helping us along the way,” Samson said. “He provides a ton of support, he’s available to us all the time. We’re in communication all the time.”
The pair also anticipated slower summer months when students leave, but said they are prepared for the seasonal adjustment. Lee said they are already fielding messages from students that are “super excited.” Samson said the team’s social media presence is catered to both college students and the local population. They can be followed @KwenchAmherst on Instagram and Facebook.
“As we know, Facebook is more catered to the older crowd so we already have a good amount of followers that are in the older generation and Instagram reaches out to that college-age millennial,” Samson said. “I think we can appeal to the locals where we are trying to localize a lot of our menu items too – Chandra came up with some really good names for our super juices.”
Those names are locally charged with titles such as ‘The Poet’ for Emily Dickinson, “The Minuteman,” and the “Quabbin Quinoa Bowl.”
“We can be reached on our Facebook or Instagram pages at pretty much any time,” Lee said. “We’re just super excited to serve the community, we really are.”