Jamba Juice Company was founded as the Juice Store in 1987. It was the brain-child of Kirk Perron, an exercise enthusiast in the San Francisco Bay Area, who was frustrated that he could not find healthy snacks after his strenuous workouts (Steinhauer, 1997, 2). In 1991, Perron decided to expand the company by franchising fifteen outlets. However, he abandoned this endeavor after becoming dissatisfied with the way the juice bars were being operated. Jamba Juice expects to convert the remaining franchises from Juice Clubs to Jamba Juice bars beginning this year.
Perron sought out private investors, pooled some three million dollars, renamed his juice bars Jamba Juice Co., and embarked on a massive expansion program which he intends to take national in the next five years. In fact Perron's goal is to have 1,000 Jamba Juice bars nationally within those five years (Steinhauer, 1997, 1). He intends to use Starbuck's Coffee as his model for successfully nationalizing his company (Hoover, 1997, 2).
According to the industry periodical, Nation's Restaurant News, currently there are forty-six Jamba Juice bars throughout California. Despite the fact that some critics are skeptical that the company can go national, there is no doubting Jamba Juice's phenomenal success in California. Jamba Juice has managed, in just seven years, to carve out by far the largest share of an extremely competitive California market in which hundreds of smoothie-serving juice bars are operated by no less than 150 different companies (Hoover, 1997, 1). The stakes in the smoothie market wars are extremely high; in 1996 California sales alone reached an estimated 340 million dollars (Seo, 1997, 1).
Jamba Juice's main product is a series of different blended fruit or vegetable concoctions called Smoothie drinks. There is no straining or extraction process involved with these drinks: "Instead, chunks of whole fruit are pulverized in a blender along with...