Farm-to-jar juice vendor Kimberly Zimmerman is living The Juicy Life

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Immediately after jarring her freshly pressed juices, Kimberly Zimmerman whisks them into her Prius and begins her delivery route, made up of doorsteps and front porches across the Santa Ynez Valley.

“We are direct-to-consumer only, meaning, we do a milk man-style delivery to people’s homes,” said Zimmerman, founder of The Juicy Life. “We pick up glass jars that have been used by the client the week before, and we wash and sanitize and reuse those jars each week, and then redeliver them back to people’s homes.”

Zimmerman uses fruits, vegetables, and other produce sourced from local growers as the rotating bases for her juice blends listed on her farm-to-jar menu, which shifts each week depending on what ingredients are available. Her typical weekly workflow consists of collecting orders from patrons by Saturday, gathering the produce she needs on Sunday, completing her orders on Monday morning, and delivering the juices between Monday afternoon and evening.

“It’s pretty much immediate. … With juice and the high perishability of an unpasteurized juice in a glass jar, we have a very small window of time to get the juices to a doorstep and making sure they’re getting into the refrigerator at their house,” said Zimmerman, who will wait for a text confirmation that somebody’s home and available to accept their juice order before leaving. 

“Although we have had clients that we’ve worked with for years where we’re dropping it right in their refrigerator for them,” added Zimmerman, who’s been delivering juices to residents of Solvang and other valley areas for more than a decade. “[That’s] based on trust and developing relationships, and really just taking care of people and their health needs.”

Zimmerman is also a longtime yoga instructor, and there are plenty of instances in which her two businesses find synergy. Her approach with curating juice bases directly aligns with a core yoga tenet, for example.

“Part of what my focus was, or excitement was, in doing juice this way was to use what the farmers had a lot of extra of for a couple reasons. One, that’s specifically what’s going to be best for our bodies,” Zimmerman explained. “We study Ayurveda, which is a sister science to yoga. And the things that are growing in abundance in specific areas are the things that usually the human body that’s living in that same environment or climate would benefit from.”

She used watermelon as an example and zeroed in on the fruit’s hydrating qualities and summer prevalence to illustrate her point.

“Because watermelon is high in water, and typically it grows during summer months when it’s 100 degrees outside, and as humans living in this area, we’re going to be perspiring more and needing some of the additional electrolytes and sugars that are in watermelon juice,” Zimmerman said. “So having that in the juices not only helps the farmers, because they’re going to have a ton of it, making it less wasteful for them if they don’t have a place for that watermelon to go, but also helping the client, the customer, have the most effective, efficient, nutrient-dense, and enriching juice possible for them.”

In early March, Zimmerman will be among the featured food and drink professionals at the Santa Barbara County Women Winemakers and Culinarians Celebration. Attendees can look forward to servings of The Juicy Life’s black juice, aka “the hangover juice,” with activated charcoal, honey, lavender, lemon, and more, Zimmerman explained. 

“It’s really great after a long day of wine tasting, [and/or] eating decadent food that you might not normally eat,” she said. “It’s very hydrating, relaxing because of the lavender in it. It has aromatherapy components to it. … It’s good for decadent experiences.”

Arts Editor Caleb Wiseblood is staying hydrated thanks to his Brita. Send calming comments to cwiseblood@santamariasun.com. 

This article appears in Feb 27 – Mar 9, 2025.