Lorie Ward will tell you she is Southern — she just came from a different South. The founder of Fairhope Juice Company grew up in San Diego, California, and spent 18 years in pharmaceutical sales before trading “sick care” for a cold-press machine and a storefront on Highway 98 at Battles Wharf, the stretch of shoreline between Fairhope and Point Clear.
Today she produces about 400 bottles of juice a week, runs seasonal cleanses, coaches clients on food healing, and talks about the day Fairhope might become a “Blue Zone” — one of the communities where residents routinely live healthily past 100. The route from corporate pharma to juicing ran through a conference in Venice, California, a borrowed kitchen at a bakery, and a pandemic-era storefront that needed repairs.
From pharmaceutical sales to juice
Ward holds a BS in Health Education and built her career in pharmaceutical sales, but her real passion was always nutrition — specifically the idea of healing with raw food. The corporate job demanded so much energy that she treated herself to an annual retreat, and in 2018 that habit took her to the first-ever Goodnature juice conference in Venice, with its design-your-own-juice-kitchen theme. She was so fired up by the end of it that she made a large investment in a cold-press machine without knowing exactly what she would do with it.
The machine sat while she figured out the rest. She had discovered Fairhope after attending a conference at the Grand Hotel and began sketching the lifestyle she wanted to lead someday. Six years after that first visit, she made the move. The learning curve was real — branding, marketing, and the health department’s rules for commercial juice. A break came from Jennifer Hafner at Warehouse Bakery on Nichols Avenue, who agreed to let Ward bring the cold press into the bakery and sell her blends there. She worked as a pharmaceutical sales rep and a juicer at the same time, left the industry in October 2019, and started Fairhope Juice Company in June of that year with 18 juices in the cooler.
Jubilee, Reclaim and Soul Shine
The blends carry the coast in their names. The bestseller is the Jubilee — carrot, apple and lemon with medicinal ginger and turmeric added. Reclaim combines Romaine lettuce, cilantro, celery, cucumber, apple, lemon and ginger, the cilantro doing the heavy lifting among compounds associated with detoxing heavy metals. Soul Shine — apple, pineapple, cucumber and mint — is the skin blend.
Sourcing stays local where the county allows it. Ward gets her organic produce through John Thomas at the Piggly Wiggly — a far cry from her startup days, when she drove to a Whole Foods in Mobile four days a week to keep the cooler stocked. Baldwin County’s citrus growers supply her seasonal Geaux Skinny blend of satsumas, grapefruit and Meyer lemons.
From a borrowed kitchen to Battles Wharf
When COVID-19 shut restaurants in 2020 and her juicing at the bakery slowed, a friend stepped in. Ken Buck, owner of Battles Wharf Market, offered Ward a storefront adjacent to his store — a space that needed repairs, but his market was considered essential and stayed open. She renovated the place herself, bit by bit, and moved Fairhope Juice Company to its home at 18327 Highway 98, open Tuesday through Friday from 8:30 a.m. to 5 p.m. and Saturday until 2 p.m.
Sustainability is part of the business model. Customers rinse and return the 13-ounce glass containers, which are reused or recycled through Don Bates’ Osprey Initiative, a coastal litter-reduction program. Ward is certified in Food Healing and Health Coaching, and her cleanses pair five cold-pressed organic blends a day with a vegan adaptation broth that supports the gut microbiome, plus scheduled instructions and tips for the detox process — a popular reset after the holidays.
Blue Zones and teaching farms
Ward’s ambitions reach past the counter. She is involved with the Hope Community’s outreach initiative to create a teaching farm and teaching kitchen at the Anna T. Jeanes facility on South Section Street and Twin Beach Road, where community members will learn to grow and cook fresh fruits and vegetables.
The longer-term vision is borrowed from the world’s longevity hotspots: Blue Zone communities, where residents eat largely plant-based organic diets, keep strong social ties, walk everywhere and share a common faith. Ward believes Fairhope has the ingredients — the walkability, the growers, the community spirit — and that with education and resources it could become one. In the meantime, she considers her own dreams fulfilled: she spends her days connecting with people and talking about health, one 13-ounce bottle at a time.