Fresh Samantha

Fresh Samantha is a small, family-owned Maine company which makes very very yummy all-natural juices. They're hard to find outside New England but have started to reach further down the East Coast. They make the best, freshest juice you can buy in stores. They never use concentrates, highly processed ingredients, artificial sweeteners, or processed sugar, and they're quite proud of it - it says so on every bottle.

The bottles feature pictures drawn by co-founder and children's book illustrator Abby Levin. She CEO/co-founder/husband Doug Levin have a daughter Samantha, for whom the company is named. Each bottle also has an anecdote about Fresh Samantha - the "Willy Boy" Soy Shake bottle talks about Willy Boy, the family dog.

A partial list of flavors:

• Orange Juice
• Orange Carrot
• Soy Shake
• Banana Strawberry Smoothie
• Mango Mama
• Lemonade

Body Zoomers:
These are regular yummy fruit drinks, fortified with things like Bioflavinoids and Ginkgo Biloba.

• Desperately Seeking C
• Get Smart

Summer Samantha flavors:

• Watermelon Whirler
• Energizer Ginseng
• Lulo Limeade
• Fuchsia Lemonade

A word of warning. Fresh Samantha drinks can be hazardous to your wallet. They are so good, so scrumptious, so full of deliciousness, that all you need is one "hit" to be hooked. The drinks are not cheap, and once you have had it, you can never go back. My habit is increasing to 2 bottles a day. If I dont stop, this will turn out to be close to 200 dollars a month. Help.

Fresh Samantha is a bunch of sellouts! Well, ok, maybe not quite. Anyway, I know a good bit about them, since my dad, who owns a very small graphic design firm in Portland, Maine, was in charge of almost all their label designs (Abby Carter did the outline drawings, Dad would do the color and layout) and PR materials. That is to say, my family's income increased about 33% for that time while they were giving him such a steady stream of work.

Now, correct me if I'm wrong, but the whole point of Fresh Samantha was "yummy juices from Maine". Well, it was kind of a letdown to many when the local newspaper here published the story about them moving their main factory to Florida, since, you know, that's where all the oranges and stuff come from. The last straw was when they agreed to sell the business to Odwalla, the California based juice company that distributed a similar product out west.

At this point, they effectively told my dad to get lost, since they were going to use Odwalla's in-house design shop for all the work (so if you see the quality of the labels deteriorating...). Doug Levin, Abby's husband and CEO of Fresh Samantha, has moved shop to California to join the Odwalla team out there. However, if you go to their website, you will see none of this. I wonder why.

I wouldn't be surprised, either, if they just merge the entire Fresh Samantha product line into Odwalla and start selling them out east. Another one bites the dust...

I dislike the fact that after moving to Florida and selling to Odwalla, the word "fresh" was removed from the name and the line of juices and juice drinks is now simply titled Samantha. It's unsettling, it brings to mind the thought that maybe the ingredients now aren't fresh enough to legally have the word "fresh" in the product name. Anyway, I'm pretty heartbroken over the whole thing, Fresh Samantha Raspberry Dream was my favorite drink for the longest time, and now I just feel like a sellout drinking one... Fresh Samantha always made me feel so cool about being a Maine native...

Another Maine product that's really not a Maine product anymore is Humpty Dumpty potato chips, who sold to a company in Canada. Although, I'd say it's a safe bet that the potatos are still Maine potatos since we grow so many here.