For Leslie Zinn, Arden’s Garden is about more than a healthy treat or a clever rhyme — it’s a testament to the way her mother lived her life.
Founded 31 years ago and named after the late Arden Zinn, the brand is where the two women helped redefine Atlanta’s health food scene while steadily growing more alike. Leslie is reminded of that every time she looks at the pulp remnants at the bottom of her morning smoothie.
“I drink a smoothie, then I fill the smoothie bottle with water, shake it up and drink what’s left,” she said. “I don’t want to lose any of the goodness, and that (attitude) was my mother.”
Credit: arvin.temkar@ajc.com
Credit: arvin.temkar@ajc.com
As CEO of Arden’s Garden, Leslie has grown the company to 19 locations across metro Atlanta with about 240 employees, and she has successfully taken the company into retail stores across the Southeast. Recently, the company has been expanding into Midwest grocers.
While the company has flourished in Atlanta’s small business scene, Leslie said her mother’s crusade of promoting health and wellness remains central to the brand. The company’s newest Atlanta area stores are in neighborhoods that lack access to fresh produce and the antioxidants therein.
“People in food deserts need and want access to fresh food,” she said. “We said, ‘OK, this needs to be part of our intentional business plan — to locate in food deserts.’”
Credit: arvin.temkar@ajc.com
Credit: arvin.temkar@ajc.com
Leslie took over as CEO in 1999. Her mother died at 83 years old in late 2020 from complications of COVID-19 and Parkinson’s disease. Leslie described it as surreal, especially given that she struggled with drug addiction while in college.
Diverging lifestyles, especially around health, once separated her from her mother, but through rehab, recovery and a focus on wellness, their stories would intertwine through Arden’s Garden.
“It made me who I am today,” Leslie said, now 40 years sober.
Nearly one in three restaurants fail, according to the National Restaurant Association, presenting an uphill battle for any upstart trying to crack the market. Focusing on cold-pressed juice and vegan food is even more challenging because not all customers are health conscious. But Leslie said her mother didn’t care — the mission was her main squeeze and earned loyalty wherever she went.
“Strong brands often have heritage as part of their ethos,” said Doug Bowman, a marketing professor at Emory University. He said the story behind Arden’s Garden “is a strong pillar of the brand combined with their community aspect.”
Juicing everything (even broccoli)
Leslie said Arden was always ahead of every health fad.
Growing up in south Buckhead, she was in a household that was a revolving door of exotic natural ingredients and raw foods. Leslie said breakfast was often a blended drink called “the concoction,” which contained Arden Zinn’s muse of the moment.
Arden’s fitness kick would later become a public affair.
She debuted an exercise show called “The New Fit Bit” on public broadcasting in 1970. A year later, she opened the Arden Zinn Studio fitness center in Buckhead, which later grew to locations across three states. She also served as the stretch coach for Georgia Tech’s football team, the Atlanta Falcons and the Atlanta Hawks.
“My mom’s currency in life was wellness,” Leslie said. “She never cared about money, but if she was helping you be healthy, she was rich.”
Credit: AJC
Credit: AJC
Arden’s mission-over-money mentality was the impetus for her juicing career.
Arden in 1993 got a new credit card to spend $2,200 on a Norwalk-branded cold press juicer, an item she coveted for decades. Leslie said her mother’s experimentations led to many tasty triumphs, and a few lessons on what not to juice.
“She was making any juice you can imagine,” Leslie said. “I remember she made broccoli juice — you never ever want to make broccoli juice.” (Apparently it tastes like a concentrated version of broccoli’s sulphury smell.)
The successes, however, planted seeds that would grow into Arden’s Garden.
Hairdressers and pizza shops
The business started in the back of a health food store, but its first few months bore little fruit.
In search of customers, Arden had the idea of going to hair salons across Atlanta, peddling her products and letting the rumor mill run from there.
“They were kind of the influencers of the ’90s,” Leslie said. “You go to your hairstylist and you would talk about what you’re into, and they would tell you what other people are doing.”
Juice sales tripled, Leslie said. And with that revelation, a quirky business model was born.
Increasing sales led the Zinns to rent a closed Little Caesars pizza shop in Virginia-Highland, converting it into a juice plant. Before long, neighbors would come and ask to buy juice directly from the store, which led the family to add a front counter to take orders.
In 1995, the store manager at the nearby Kroger at Ansley Mall took notice and offered to stock Arden’s Garden juices on store shelves.
“Little did we know, that store in 1995 was the busiest Kroger in Atlanta,” Leslie said. “Overnight, we were juicing 24 hours a day, seven days a week in this little retail space just for that one store and Kroger.”
Credit: arvin.temkar@ajc.com
Credit: arvin.temkar@ajc.com
Breaking into retail is a challenge for any brand, especially for perishable goods, Bowman said.
“It’s not just the idea of getting on the shelf in some of these major retailers,” he said. “You then need to generate the local demand to make sure that product is selling, so that it stays.”
Gaining brand loyalty
As the company scaled, its processes were refined for mass manufacturing. But the core of the products weren’t compromised, Leslie said.
This is especially true when it comes to heat — and keeping it far away from the juice.
The company’s current juice factory off Sylvan Road in East Point outputs up to 30,000 bottles per shift. Every step in the process avoids heating up or cooking the produce, which Leslie said preserves nutrients.
Rather than pasteurization, which uses heat to kill potential bacteria, Arden’s Garden uses high pressure processing for sterilization. It’s a process that involves up to 87,000 pounds per square inch of pressure, effectively the same as being 27 miles underwater.
“It’s an amazing technology which doesn’t damage the nutrition in the juice or the food,” Leslie said. “It gives you a safer product, a higher-quality product and a longer shelf life.”
Credit: arvin.temkar@ajc.com
Credit: arvin.temkar@ajc.com
Product safety is paramount, Leslie said, but she said healthy food is also perishable.
“If the food can sit on the shelf for a year and it’s still OK to eat, you can be sure there’s no life force in it,” she said. “You want to eat foods that have life in them.”
But choosing to avoid pasteurization has cost Arden’s Garden customers.
After a high-profile E. coli outbreak by juice giant Odwalla in 1996, Arden’s Garden’s largest customer, Kroger, pulled unpasteurized juice from shelves, Leslie said.
“We lost them as a client, but what we gained was brand loyalty,” she said. Kroger declined to comment for this article.
The following year, Arden’s Garden was added to Publix stores, but that relationship also included its fair share of scares.
In 2001, Coca-Cola acquired Odwalla, which prompted Publix to threaten to remove Arden’s Garden products from its stores. This led to a grassroots campaign from Arden’s Garden supporters, which resulted in Publix quintupling the number of stores carrying the brand’s juice, Leslie said.
‘An oasis of health’
The Arden’s Garden factory features pulp and juice flowing through an accordion of nets and filters.
When it’s time to process beets, the factory can look like a red-stained crime scene, while ginger and jalapeño sessions fill the air with stinging compounds and capsaicin, requiring additional personal protective equipment.
Arden’s Garden has scaled its stores and retail footprint without investor funds, financing each next step based on in-house profits. Leslie said, “If we could afford to open a store, we opened a store.”
Credit: arvin.temkar@ajc.com
Credit: arvin.temkar@ajc.com
Bowman said it’s difficult to preserve control over a company’s direction when outside investors are involved.
Without outside investors, Arden’s Garden “can have a much more long-term focus and stay true to the heritage of the brand,” he added.
Stefany Velasco, who has worked at Arden’s Garden since graduating high school in 2007, said Leslie’s focus on nutrients runs counter to most other food and beverage companies where taste is king.
“Sometimes she’s mixing things, and we’re like, ‘Wait, that doesn’t seem to be tasting good,’ said Velasco, now the company’s data manager. “But Leslie says, ‘It doesn’t matter — it’s good for you.’ She really cares, and it’s cool to see that aspect of her mom in her now.”
Leslie said her mother’s altruism and focus on health has grown within her over the decades, and it’s a lifestyle she’s trying to cultivate out in the wild.
“I want Arden’s Garden to be an oasis of health,” she said.
AJC Her+Story is a series in The Atlanta Journal-Constitution highlighting women founders, creators, executives and professionals. It is about building a community. Know someone the AJC should feature in AJC Her+Story? Email us at herstory@ajc.com with your suggestions. Check out more of our AJC Her+Story coverage at ajc.com/herstory.
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