It’s all about the juice

Passion for health drove business success

By A PRELL M Ay MUNFORD amunford@repub.com

Each day between 5 and 6 a.m., cold fruit hits a blade at Cellf Juices before the morning hustle and bustle begins.

Jazlinda Navarro, the owner of Springfield’s first coldpressed juice bar, located at 1026 Bay St., believes her passion for health and nutrition is what has led to the success of the business.

Navarro said Cellf began as part of her individual self-love and healing journey. Armed with the inspiration for health, fasting and nutrition, she now hopes to support others in reaching their best self, or Cellf.

“The journey to self-love is a selfish journey. I am sharing that with the community and I want to make sure people are supported in their own journey,” she said.

With no loans, Navarro invested her own funds in the juice bar and it paid off, she said. Investment in the right equipment is what Navarro said is the first thing that makes her juice bar different

Farming

CONTINUES FROM PAGE L8 said. “My grandfather told me: We have so many cucumbers, more than enough to feed our family — how can we give these a new home?”

The next season, Bardwell Farm opened its first stand in front of the family homestead.

“At that time, I believe Bardwell Farm established a new chapter in its history,” Bardwell added.

Bardwell’s grandparents encouraged his father not to become a farmer, so he explored other interests and became a carpenter. But the love for farming was undeniable for Harrison Bardwell, so he learned as much as he could at home and, after graduating from high school, attended the Stockbridge School of Agriculture at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.

“I started my official work on this farm in 11th grade and worked and managed Bardwell Farm as I continued my education,” he said.

He is the ninth generation of the family to run the farm that dates to 1685, and Bardwell from others.

“It is not a regular machine; the fruit only hits the blade one time and then it is pressed,” she said.

According to Navarro, the average machine creates heat and oxidizes the cold-pressed juice. The twin gears in the juicer at Cellf provide a greater can track his ancestry back to the early 1600s when members of his family settled in Hampshire County after arriving from England.

“It’s really neat to still have Bardwells in the town where they first settled,” he added.

At the Stockbridge school, Bardwell pursued an associate degree. “Going to Stockbridge gave me scientific background and broadened my mind immensely,” he said.

Although Hatfield’s soil is some of the best in the world, Bardwell takes good care to ensure it stays rich with nutrients.

“Any type of soil thrives off diversity, so when you rotate crops it gives the life of the soil so much more energy,” he said. “You need to help the life in the soil to help plants to grow their best.”

Bardwell has adopted the no-till and limited-till practices in his fields.

“Research shows the less you disturb the soil, the more vibrant and healthier the microbes are to be able to thrive,” he explained.

The crops include everything from kale and cabbage, tomatoes and peppers, to sweet corn and squash. “I love growing pickling cucumbers because it’s my favorite veggie to eat,” he added.

Bardwell also utilizes greenhouses and high tunnels on his farm, with efforts to harvest vegetables year-round. High tunnels are temporary, tall, covered structures that help protect crops from harsh weather.

“We’re able to harvest spinach, arugula, kale, lettuce mixes, and Swiss chard in the middle of February, allowing us to keep more staff and obtain more revenue,” Bardwell said.

This year, Bardwell and his team grew colored bell peppers in a high tunnel, and they harvested a much better-quality crop.

“My grandfather always said, ‘You’re at the mercy of Mother Nature,’ and this is 100 percent true,” Bardwell said. “Weather dictates what you do every single hour, every single day of your life.” Bardwell has noticed firsthand how climate change has impacted farming.

“When I started seven years ago, we had normal rainfall, and it would get cold in late October or early November,” he said. “Over the years we’ve lost that nice steady rain, and it’s been replaced with heavy, harsh thunderstorms causing a lot of rain in a short amount of time.

“A drought for three weeks and a heavy thunderstorm scares me more because it can drastically affect a condition of a crop or field,” he said. Weather changes also impact diseases and pests that can hurt crops. “Farmers must still be able to produce a high-quality crop, but it takes twice the work that it used too,” he added. Reflecting on his short yet gratifying farming career thus far, Bardwell expressed appreciation for what he’s learned from the region’s farming community, and, in turn, works to share that knowledge. He welcomes elementary schools for field trips to Bardwell Farm, and students in the Stockbridge School of Agriculture also visit for tours or work study programs. He tells others that farmers must be quick on their feet and sleeping past 8 a.m. on the weekend isn’t an option. “You need to be good at making quick decisions for the best solution in the moment,” he said.

Bardwell is excited for what the future will bring and has a feeling his grandparents would be proud of what he’s created for the Bardwell Farm in the 21st century.

“It’s taken countless hours and dedication from other farmers in this town, along with friends, family and my mom and dad who have been able to help me get to where I am today,” he said. “If every person on Earth could spend one day on a farm doing hands-on manual labor, it would allow people to see its importance, as we wouldn’t be able to survive.” our teams have learned to embrace more flexible work arrangements.

We lean more on technology to bridge some of the gaps that emerge when we are not all able to be in the same place at the same time. We also recognize that the way people choose to shop at Big Y has irrevocably changed during this time, and we have had to rethink our go-to-market strategies to effectively reach our shoppers.

We are, however, adapting and evolving thoughtfully, adopting only the innovations and technologies that fit within our company mission to deliver a personal connection that benefits our customers and communities with every product, service, and solution we provide.

Convenience and choice are of the utmost importance universally — but what is convenient and the preferred way to shop for one person isn’t necessarily the same as for another.

For some, what brings them through our doors is the promise of seeing a familiar face at the end of the aisle, checking out their groceries, bagging them expertly and loading them into their cart. For others, the independence of self-checkout is preferred, minimizing contact and still allowing shoppers to select their own groceries. We now offer self-checkout as an option in the majority of our supermarkets.

For others still, we offer contact-free curbside pickup through our Big Y myPicks online ordering service, leveraging the speed and efficiency of our state-of-theart micro-fulfillment center in Chicopee to pick and pack orders quickly, but still completing each order with the human touch of a Big Y employee, checking orders for accuracy and providing best-in-class customer service.

We offer myPicks sameday, curbside pickup and now delivery for 11 of our stores in and around the Springfield metro area in addition to Instacart delivery that is available to all 73 Big Y supermarkets across Massachusetts and Connecticut.

The pandemic inspired our team to push beyond the known and familiar and to embrace new areas of technological innovation. For example, we now offer a mobile scan and go app, myExpress Checkout, that delivers the fastest way to get in and out of our stores — to grab a quick lunch or to bypass the lines that inevitably form at the end of a long work day.

These days our phones are almost always in our hands, so we are working tirelessly toward a goal of providing our shoppers with best-inclass mobile experience on our website, on our app, and in our stores. We offer our weekly flyer digitally every week so you may browse the sales and load myBigY offers into your digital account before you shop, saving you valuable time and helping to better plan your trip. We still have work to do to make this digital experience as seamless as possible, but we are proud of our accomplishments thus far, and of the collaboration of our teams working together to reach this goal.

The interesting thing about all of this is that, despite how “techie” it all might sound for a supermarket that has been serving your community for over 85 years, our mission at Big Y remains unchanged.

We are people working together to provide exceptional value and a personal shopping experience that makes daily life easier, more healthful and more enjoyable for our shoppers. Big Y is poised to take on the challenges of the future, and we will do so with our eyes and ears open, listening and responding to our employees and our shoppers whose feedback and ideas help guide our way forward.

We sell groceries, yes, but we are a people company, so innovation and new solutions are explored and adopted if and only if they make shopping at Big Y more convenient and enjoyable for our shoppers.

Sarah Steven is vice president of marketing at Big Y Foods; to learn more about Big Y, go online to BigY.com.