Lee An­na Ma­haraj

leean­na.ma­haraj@guardian.co.tt

On a day when many mark Cor­pus Christi by plant­i­ng crops and re­con­nect­ing with na­ture, one busi­ness is trans­form­ing lo­cal­ly grown pro­duce in­to nu­tri­ent-packed bev­er­ages.

The Fit Fruit Pow­er Punch brand, op­er­at­ed by 34-year-old Trinci­ty res­i­dent John Mar­tin Castagne and his part­ner, 28-year-old Ja­maican na­tion­al She­vaun Mor­gan, is go­ing back to its roots, us­ing lo­cal­ly sourced fruits and oth­er nat­ur­al in­gre­di­ents to cre­ate healthy juices.

“It is more or less like a fruit smooth­ie, so we just clean the fruits and blend them with­in the right pro­por­tions. Then we bot­tle it. We use ab­solute­ly no sweet­en­er, the sweet­ness in the drink is the fruits. It’s a very sim­ple and nat­ur­al process, and be­cause it’s a nat­ur­al juice, it fer­ments faster than nor­mal juice, that’s why we put it straight in our freez­er. We al­so use a nat­ur­al preser­v­a­tive which is just pure vi­t­a­min C, ascor­bic acid, so now a bot­tle in your freez­er can last up to two months,” Castagne ex­plained.

Castagne, the grand­son of the late Patrick Castagne, writer of T&T’s na­tion­al an­them, said his pas­sion for health and well­ness was shaped by per­son­al ex­pe­ri­ences.

“My fa­ther suf­fered from mul­ti­ple scle­ro­sis. He was a big lawyer, but he went from an elo­quent man, bust­ing cas­es in courts and get­ting peo­ple off the death penal­ty, to with­er­ing down to ba­si­cal­ly a veg­etable. He passed away when I was 15 years old. So, I saw the degra­da­tion of my fa­ther’s health. But I be­lieve that na­ture, in terms of the heal­ing of na­ture, I be­lieve na­ture has every an­swer for us,” he said.

Castagne said those ex­pe­ri­ences sparked his in­ter­est in health and well­ness, which even­tu­al­ly led him to ap­pre­ci­ate a fruit-rich and plant-based lifestyle.

“Our mis­sion is to get peo­ple healthy, and to im­pact chron­ic ill­ness­es in so­ci­ety…there’s noth­ing that beats na­ture. We use beet­root, blue­ber­ry, spinach, cu­cum­ber, car­rot, paw­paw, lime gin­ger, turmer­ic, pineap­ple and ba­nana for our dif­fer­ent flavours,” he ex­plained. “Like nine out of ten times, the juice you like the most is be­cause you’re de­fi­cient in that nu­tri­ent. For in­stance, peo­ple who are anaemic love blue­ber­ries. Peo­ple who are sleep de­prived, spinach is their favourite, be­cause mag­ne­sium is na­ture’s sleep min­er­al.”

The in­gre­di­ents used in their bev­er­ages are all grown and pro­duced by var­i­ous farm­ers and ven­dors across T&T.

“Our fruit sup­pli­ers are main­ly from the Tal­paro/Tamana area. We get paw­paw and ba­nanas, which are some of the main in­gre­di­ents. We pur­chase our ap­ples and stuff from Food Bas­ket, be­cause they have nice, clean fresh pro­duce. And every­thing else we get from the farm­ers in the Port-of-Spain mar­ket,” he said.

Look­ing ahead, he said the com­pa­ny is in the process of se­cur­ing land to cul­ti­vate some of its own pro­duce, al­low­ing the busi­ness to be­come even more self-suf­fi­cient.

He shared that he al­so hopes the ven­ture can cre­ate op­por­tu­ni­ties for young peo­ple in the com­mu­ni­ty.