FAQs

Thanks for thinking of us, a Picky stockist is only a stone’s throw away: Take your pick from our store locator.

Our Picky journey begins way back on the orchard. After just the right amount of sunshine, our fruit is handpicked at their peak ripeness – then immediately taken and chilled to ‘fridge like’ conditions to ensure they are maintained in optimal shape for pressing. The fruit is cold pressed – just once. This means we do not add any heat or enzymes. It’s an essential step to create a juice or smoothie that actually tastes like the fruit from which it came. 

The juices and smoothies are then treated with an optimal amount of heat (our food scientists refer to this step as pasteurisation). We then rapidly cool and cold fill our juice into the final bottle. The filling process is entirely sterile, which allows our products to have a much longer shelf life than most juices.

To keep the Picky range tasting fresh, making sure they are kept chilled. 

When you cut open an apple, it goes brown. No one wants to eat a brown apple, and no one wants to drink brown juice either. That’s why we recommend you keep Picky in the fridge so you can experience the freshest tasting juice and smoothie.

We're Picky, just like you. Which means we never add sugars to our products. The sugar is naturally occurring, just like the fruit itself.

Natural flavours are used to enhance the taste of foods while keeping them consistent and appealing, even though they come from natural sources, the process to create them can still be quite technical. 

Natural flavours are extracted from natural sources such as fruits and vegetables.

Plastic is by no means the perfect solution but as we’ve discovered right now plastic is the lowest carbon option for us to get our drinks to you.

We opt for clear PET bottles (plastic code 1) and HDPE caps (plastic code 2) as these are easily recycled in Aotearoa and 97% of New Zealanders have access to facilities to recycle them.

These types of plastic are widely accepted in kerbside recycling and free drop-off points because there are high volumes of these materials and they can be recycled and turned into other useful products, such as another bottle or food-grade plastic containers for meats, biscuits, berries and the like. That said, we are exploring ways to offset our use of plastic packaging and ultimately are committed to reducing our reliance on using fossil fuels.

Our bottles are lightweight and are up to 25% lighter than typical juice bottles, meaning we produce less plastic for each juice served. Further to this, we’re investigating moving to Recycled PET (rPET) and/or plant-based bottles in the near future. Sustainability is always a moving target and we are trying our best to find the right solutions.

We often get asked why we wouldn’t use glass to bottle our juices – for all its good points glass has high carbon emissions – for example, a glass bottle must be reused 20 times to make its carbon footprint comparable with a recycled PET bottle. This is part of the reason why a number of craft beer breweries are moving away from glass to aluminium cans. Additionally, glass isn’t as sterile (aseptic) as PET, so our juice would need to be chilled and would only have a 30-day shelf life. The shorter shelf life would create greater food waste and would also mean higher emissions through refrigeration and chilled freight.

Our bottles are PET 1 grade and can be recycled in kerbside collections. Be sure to remove the lid and sleeve (put this in the rubbish) and clean the bottle before putting it into your kerbside recycling.

NZ: Apple, Pear, Feijoa, Lemon, Manuka Honey and Gold Kiwifruit are sourced from NZ growers. Sometimes Blueberries.

Overseas: In some instances, it is hard to source enough fruit grown in NZ on a commercial scale. For example, our mangos and passionfruit in the Tropical Smoothie are imported ingredients. However, we are always looking to improve and source these ingredients from NZ once it becomes available.

Orange Juice: In our Orange & Apple Juice, the apples are sourced from Hawke’s Bay (and sometimes Nelson) in NZ. Whereas, due to the shortage of high quality oranges available for us to juice in NZ, we are currently sourcing them from Valencia in Spain – which is the Mecca of Oranges.

Yes, all of our product range is vegan. Our product range is also safe for pregnant women to consume as it is pasteurised. 

Our juices and smoothies are pasteurised – which means that the fruit is treated with an optimal amount of heat, rapidly cooled and cold filled our juice into the final bottle. Pasteurised beverages also means that it is safe for consumption while pregnant.

Our Picky 100% NZ Apple Juice is made with JAZZ™ apples. Same formulation, different name.

Hello. We’re Picky.

Truth is, we always were. While we loved our time tinkering with perfecting apple juice, it soon led to wanting to try out all the other yummy stuff in nature’s toy box. With good reason, all the other top-notch produce in our deliciously fresh juices and fabulously fruity smoothies were feeling a little left out.

So, just like fresh fruit ripening in the Hawke’s Bay sunshine, we’ve had a glow up. We think our new name fits like a brand-spanking new pair of Red Bands. Because being Picky sums up the way we’ve always done things. We’ve always been exacting about using the best fruit, working with the best people so we can make the best juices and smoothies. We’re proud of how selective we are when it comes to doing what we do. Picky isn’t just the way we’ve always done things, it’s the way we’ll keep on doing them. So we’re wearing our heart on our sleeve.

Speaking of what we’re wearing — you’ll notice we’ve gone beyond the gumboots and sorted out an entirely new outfit. We want our bottles to be as vibrant, flavourful and refreshing as what’s inside them, bringing a fruity little celebration to your local chiller. We look forward to meeting you.

We’re Picky. By nature

Picky was started by our founders Sally Gallagher and Ross Beaton. Ross was a passionate orchardist who wanted to find another life for fruit that was deemed unsuitable for selling because of being cosmetically challenged/AKA ugly fruit.