Keep It Simple: This Oakland Entrepreneur Only Uses Fruits and Vegetables in Her Juices
February 21, 2025
At Oakland-based Keep It Simple Juice, their method is in the name: simple, seasonal, and healthy ingredients with no added sugar and no preservatives. Danielle Clark founded her business with the intention of giving her family and friends access to essential nutrients and healthy juice. Over time, her work expanded to support the health of our Bay Area community by selling her vegetable and fruit juices and fresh ginger shots at the Ferry Plaza Farmers Market.
“To me, making juice is a creative process. I get to figure out what goes together,” Danielle says. “I just want to provide a fresh option that tastes delicious, because it doesn’t have to be nasty. I can’t sell anything that I don’t like myself.” Most fruit carry natural sugars that can sweeten a drink or mask the sting of ginger. When crafting her juices and ginger shots, Danielle weighs both flavor and nutritional value equally.
Drink Your Veggies: Juice as Medicine
When Danielle started juicing for the first time, she did it to help her mother after a cancer diagnosis. “My mother is a two-time cancer survivor. The second time that it came back, I would make her juice..”
Then, she found herself making ginger shots for her father as he suffered from neuropathy, a chronic illness that damages nerve endings in the body. “He’s been drinking it since I started, and he’s able to walk around like he used to. He doesn’t need a cane to get out of bed anymore. He told me, ‘The only thing I’ve changed is drinking your ginger shots.’ That’s the stuff that keeps me going to continue my education on how I can help the community.”
Her father’s experience aligns with a study that found that ginger root extract could potentially mitigate neuropathic pain in rats by lowering inflammation in the nervous system. In fact, many fruits and vegetables carry specific health benefits when eaten whole and when juiced. Many of her juices and ginger shots contain pineapple, apples, and oranges all sourced from multiple farmers markets in the Bay Area.
Both ginger and apples have been proven to lower cholesterol levels. Pineapple is among several fruits and vegetables with antioxidants that also combat inflammation. As Danielle discovered how getting additional nutrients from juice benefited her parents, she then offered her juices to her friends.
When they get sick, Danielle says that she drops off a five-pack of ginger shots. “You can heal your body with certain fruits and vegetables. It blows my mind, the things that we’re not really taught,” she says.
Education and accessibility are at the heart of her business. At the farmers market, Danielle wants to make sure that people understand why certain ingredients are included in her drinks, so that they can take that knowledge home. She recently led a juice demo at the Foodwise Classroom, where she made her signature carrot, orange, and ginger juice while detailing the benefits these fruits and vegetables can bring.
Building a Juice Business from the Ground Up
Around the same time that she was making juices, Danielle worked several jobs in food service along with making music. Even then, she’d always wanted to be her own boss. “I never liked working for other people,” she says, “Truth be told, I did it because I had to survive.”
For Danielle, what started as a way to support her friends and family grew into something that empowers our larger Bay Area community to stay healthy. The pivot toward making her juicing hobby into a food business was natural after receiving positive feedback from friends, neighbors, and family. “I think it just aligned so beautifully. Everybody was so receptive that I just kept going,” Danielle says. “Though I started this business alone, it does take a village.”
As she considered making her juicing hobby into a food business, her friend passed her information along to Mandela Partners, who accepted her into their Food Business Pathways Program, which allowed Danielle to expand using their commercial kitchen in San Leandro.
“I think the first time I tried Danielle’s ginger shots was at the Community Taste Test for entrepreneurs who graduated from our Food Business Pathways Program,” says Loren Johnson, Entrepreneur Incubation Program Manager at Mandela Partners. “I was blown away by the flavor. It still packed the punch of a typical ginger shot without the grittiness. It was spicy, smooth, and a little sweet.”
Danielle was connected with Foodwise through Mandela Partners via the Building Equity program, which provides technical support, financial assistance, and marketing opportunities for BIPOC entrepreneurs. Her ginger shots impressed the team, and she was invited to participate in Foodwise’s Pop-Ups on the Plaza: Juneteenth on the Waterfront event in 2024.
“What makes her stand out is that she’s putting the nourishment back into people’s bodies. It’s expanding people’s palates by incorporating these different things into the juices that people don’t necessarily think about putting together,” says Foodwise’s Deven Okry.
Through the Building Equity program, Keep It Simple Juice began a pop-up residency in the Ferry Plaza Farmers Market last summer, which was extended into the fall. This winter, they became a permanent vendor in the market.
“I’ve had the great pleasure of seeing Danielle’s business grow over the past year. Now she’s operating at two markets around the Bay every weekend. She has a growth mindset, and I don’t doubt that we will see her at more markets and in stores in the near future,” Loren says.
It Takes a Village: Crowdsourcing for Community Health
Her people-centered approach is evident in the way that she crowdsources ideas for new products to add to her booth. Danielle says that if three or more people mention the same ingredient or ask about something she doesn’t offer yet, she’ll add the product to her menu.
Danielle used to just put kale, cucumber, celery, parsley, green apple, and ginger in her green juice until she had a conversation with a shopper about the benefits of cilantro, which led Danielle to eventually start including the herb in her drinks. “What keeps me going is people coming back and telling me how much they love the juice and how much it helped them. Even when people give me feedback on what I should do, that lets me know they care,” she says.
This is part of what allows Keep It Simple to keep offering unique flavor combinations like watermelon lime basil and peach pineapple apple juice. “I’m really big on providing for the community,” Danielle says, “and Foodwise gives me the chance to do that while doing something that I love.”
Find Keep It Simple Juice on Saturdays in the front plaza at the Ferry Plaza Farmers Market.
Topics: Building Equity program, Farmers market, Fruit, Health, Nutrition