What is green juice and does it have to taste like grass?

It doesn't have to taste like a hedge

The fear is fair. A juice made only of leaves and stalks is an acquired taste and a lot of people's one experience of green juice was exactly that. But green juice runs on a spectrum, from light and lightly sweet at one end to deep and fully savoury at the other and the sweet end is genuinely easy to drink.

Our Balanced Greens is the one we point sceptics at. It's kale, apple, cucumber and lemon, so you still get the greens, but the apple carries enough natural sweetness that it tastes like something you'd choose rather than something you're enduring. It's the green juice that tends to convert the people who were sure they hated green juice, which is exactly why it runs through so many of our cleanses and bundles.

What counts as green juice

At its simplest, green juice is juice pressed mostly from green vegetables: usually a mix of leafy greens like spinach and kale, water-heavy vegetables like cucumber and celery and something to balance the flavour, most often apple, lemon or ginger.

The proportions are where green juices differ wildly. Some supermarket versions are apple juice with a splash of spinach for colour. Others, like our Pure Greens, contain no fruit at all. Both are technically green juice and they're completely different drinks, which is why the ingredients list, read in order of weight, is the only reliable way to tell them apart. And it isn't a smoothie: a smoothie blends the whole vegetable with its fibre, while juice is pressed, so it's lighter and faster to drink. We compare the two in green juice vs smoothie.

What's actually in it

The leafy greens are where the colour and most of the character come from. Spinach juices smooth and mild, which is why it anchors Core Greens. Kale is more assertive, with the peppery brassica edge you'll taste in Balanced Greens. Parsley, used in smaller amounts, adds a fresh, almost grassy note. These leaves are dense in the nutrients green vegetables are known for, vitamin K, folate and minerals like iron and magnesium, alongside the chlorophyll that gives the juice its colour.

The base is cucumber and celery. Leaves alone don't yield much liquid, so most green juices are built on these high-water vegetables, which make up the volume of the drink. Cucumber is cool and neutral, celery savoury with a natural saltiness from its minerals. This is why a good green juice tastes light rather than thick: the base does the hydrating, drinkable part while the leaves do the green part.

The balancers are apple, lemon and ginger. A single apple's worth of juice softens the edge without turning the drink sweet, lemon lifts and sharpens, ginger adds warmth. In Fresh Greens, apple, lemon and parsley work around a celery, cucumber and spinach core, which is what makes it such an easy everyday drink.

Cold-pressed, then frozen

We make green juice by grinding whole vegetables and pressing the pulp under high pressure at low temperature, with no heat. Cold-pressing extracts the juice while leaving the plant structure behind and because there's no heat, the more delicate compounds aren't cooked in the process. The alternatives you meet on a shelf, fast centrifugal juicing, juice from concentrate, or pasteurised and HPP-treated juice, each trade some of that freshness for convenience or shelf life.

Fresh cold-pressed juice has a short life though, so we freeze every bottle straight after pressing. That pauses it at its freshest point with no heat treatment and no preservatives. It defrosts overnight in the fridge with its taste and colour intact, which is how we deliver unpasteurised juice across the UK without compromising what's in it. The full case for that is in is frozen juice as good as fresh?

Fruit or no fruit

Every gram of fruit in a green juice brings sugar with it and because juicing removes the fibre, that sugar arrives quickly. That isn't a reason to avoid green juice, it's a reason to read the list and choose deliberately. Our range runs the full spectrum: Celery Twist is the lightest, celery-led with a little apple, Fresh Greens and Core Greens use a modest amount of apple to stay approachable, Balanced Greens leans further into the vegetables and Pure Greens is pressed entirely from vegetables with no fruit at all, the lowest-sugar option in the range. The rule of thumb when comparing labels is simple: the earlier fruit appears in the ingredients, the sweeter the drink. For the full label-reading version see low-sugar green juice. There's never any added sugar in ours.

Start sweet, go greener

If green juice is new to you, start at the sweet end and let your taste catch up. Balanced Greens is the friendliest first glass. Fresh Greens is the easy everyday option once the taste feels normal. Core Greens adds a warming ginger note and Pure Greens waits at the greenest, fruit-free end for when you're ready. If even the sweet end feels like a leap, our celery-led Celery Twist (celery, apple, cucumber, lemon and a hint of ginger) is the gentlest way in of all, more of a light, refreshing juice than a proper green. Once it's part of your routine, there's when to drink it and what a daily glass involves.

The greens, sweetest to greenest

Here's the range in order, from the easiest-drinking to fully fruit-free:

Want the lot? The green juice bundle is the whole range in one box, or browse everything on the green juice collection.

The bottom line

So what is green juice? Juice pressed mostly from green vegetables, made light by cucumber and celery, made green by the leaves, with as much or as little fruit as the recipe allows. It doesn't have to taste like a hedge. Start sweet with Balanced Greens and work greener as your taste catches up. Browse the whole green juice collection, or read more in the greens section of The Pulp.