Jennifer Just’s enthusiasm is infectious. The twenty-six-year-old stands smiling broadly in what will soon be her own The Green Moustache Organic Juice and Live Food Bar.
“It’s super exciting,” she said.
The downtown Squamish location of the uber-popular Whistler and Vancouver franchise is set to open in early September on Second Avenue in the former home of the Sequence Board Supply store.
“We are getting the electrician in and start painting tomorrow,” Just said, as she surveyed the construction zone that will be her organic eatery in a few weeks.
“I always wanted to have a restaurant of my own one day,” she said.
Her father is a Vancouver chef and has been a huge help and inspiration along the way, she added.
Everything offered at Green Moustache restaurants is 100 per cent organic. Ingredients are sourced from local farms and suppliers, Just said.
The menu includes items such as veggie wraps, vegetarian chili, soups, raw desserts, fresh juices and smoothies.
“Nothing comes from a can, nothing is processed,” Just stressed. “We try to make everything closest to its natural state because then you are absorbing the most vitamins, you are getting the most enzymes; you are getting the most out of the food.” Her location will also offer choices geared at children and a selection of nutritious cooked food. “A lot of the dishes are designed to help prevent cancer and other illnesses,” Just said.
The eatery will host regular nutritional talks and demonstrations for varied audiences from parents to students to athletes, she added.
Just got turned on to nutrition and raw food when she took a class put on by a friend. That inspired her to take a two-year course on holistic nutrition in Vancouver.
Just’s mother has multiple sclerosis, and the family has seen what a healthy diet can do.
“She has done a lot of different treatments… and been on different drugs and stuff and there’s things that I was learning in my holistic nutrition class that she had never heard from a doctor,” Just said. “She’s totally into it.”
As part of the course, Just completed a practicum at the Green Moustache in Whistler and then worked there for two-years, commuting daily from Squamish. About a year ago she started talking about opening a location of her own in Squamish.
Whistler’s Nicolette and Pierre Richer started the Green Moustache business in 2014. Nicolette practises orthomolecular medicine, an alternative form of medicine that aims to help patients maintain health with nutritional supplementation and counsels people on the Gerson therapy, which her professional website claims to “heal chronic disease and cancer.”
“She created The Green Moustache Organic Juice and Live Food Bar to spread the message of optimum health through nutrition and to demonstrate how human health and environmental health are inextricably linked,” according to the website.
(The Canadian Cancer Society says, “there is no scientific evidence that any specific food or diet can cure cancer.” )
For more information on the Green Moustache go to, www.greenmoustache.com/.
