Broth, juice and tea: vegetables as a trend drink
Vegetables are healthy – this argument didn’t convince us as children. It also has to taste good. But let’s forget overcooked cauliflower, spinach mash or other nonsense for a moment and think of the flavors of fresh carrots or celery.
There is potential in this, for example, we could imagine aromatic drinks that combine the health aspects of a vegetable broth with the good taste of a cool drink, a kind of vegetable iced tea.
Hip and healthy with a vegetable drink
The trend around fortifying broths is nothing new. They restore forces. So-called “restaurants” were already served in the mid-18th century. These bouillons were very popular with health-conscious city dwellers in Paris who enjoyed eating them in public in a beautiful setting. That’s how restaurants have sprung up in Paris.
So everything remains the same. Because even today we want to eat healthy and tasty food, now also meat-free, sustainable and on-the-go.
We therefore set out to make a tasty vegetable extract, a broth based on a vegetable, water and supplemented with a spice.
The vegetables we use are carrots, celery, peppers and beans. We prepare the different vegetables according to variety. This means washing, peeling and chopping. We use 500 g of vegetables with 300 ml of water and prepare the broths cold to extract the maximum amount of flavor. It would be worth reconsidering whether the classic cold preparation, as practiced in the kitchen, is the optimal method or whether the laws of osmosis should be observed.
Cold preparation or osmosis, we unfortunately had to realize that this does not produce a broth that meets our taste expectations.
Juice broth
We therefore take a different approach. We juice the vegetables in a centrifuge and obtain a direct juice, which we slowly heat to 70 degrees. During this process, the cloudy substances dissolve and settle at the bottom of the pot. Once the broth has cooled down, we filter out the cloudy substances and obtain a clear, intense broth.
So now we have the best of juice: an intense, fresh, aromatic taste and broth: lightness and transparency.
Spice it up
This is exactly in line with our claim to combine health with taste and vegetable broth with trendy cold drink.
We add various spices and herbs to the result:
- Paprika with ginger
- Celery with allspice
- Carrot with turmeric
- Beans with savory
Leave the stock to simmer over a low heat for four hours. We then filter the vegetable drink through a fine sieve and pack it in a can. This underlines the claim to reach a young, urban target group and thus set a new trend.
Our V/T (Vegetable/Tea) is the new hot shit when ice cold… But even when heated, the can is a hand warmer and innovative tea in one. Is it a juice, a broth or a tea? The V/T doesn’t fit into any category. We don’t care, the important thing is that it tastes good!
But if the contents taste good, the packaging should show that too. And that’s exactly what we do at MILK. This is where content meets packaging.
Packaging design agency meets food lab
Food Lab? What does a packaging design agency have to do with the food laboratory? We want to get to the heart of the matter before designing the surface – the packaging. Only those who understand food can translate its taste into suitable food packaging design. That’s why our creative minds in the kitchen work with food long before it comes to packaging design.
You can see what this looks like in our project list. The Make SOWN sums up what our Foodlab team has developed here.
