Juice company moves to Malvern

Lumi founder Hillary Murray says healthy diet is now a passion that she wants to share with others

EAST WHITELAND » When Hillary Murray was an undergraduate at Penn State University, she and her friends had a unique way of parting company.

“Love U Mean It,” they would say.

So when Murray went on to attend business school at the University of Virginia and started her own organic juice business, what else could she call it but Lumi – Love U Mean It?

“To this day, we still say it to each other,” Murray said in a recent interview at the company’s new location near Malvern. “I always wanted to create a company called Lumi. (It) is a commitment to our consumers ... We want you to love yourself and the people you care about. So we make real food the way nature intended without additives or any artificial ingredients.”

Lumi, which markets a variety of cold-pressed juices and shots, recently signed a deal with Universal Pasteurization, a provider of cold storage and high pressure processing, or HPP, services to food and beverage manufacturers.

Lumi recently moved from its Charlottesville, Va., roots and is leasing 6,000 square feet of space within Universal’s Malvern facility. It began sending product from there last month.

Murray, 31, comes about her passion for healthy foods honestly. She recalls feeling unwell in early adulthood – until she changed her diet.

“I used to get sick often when I worked in New York City in finance,” she recalled. “Every three weeks I was on antibiotics. I was always thin, but I never ate healthy. I was constantly eating packaged foods with very long shelf lives.

“(Then) I started to eat real foods with ingredients that I could understand when I went to UVA in 2011. Since I have

“We want you to love yourself and the people you care about. So we make real food the way nature intended without additives or any artificial ingredients.” – Hillary Murray, founder and CEO of Lumi Juice

changed my diet, I haven’t been on antibiotics in over six years,” Murray said. “I work more and sleep less now as an entrepreneur than I did in finance. The only change that I made was in my diet and incorporating a cold pressed juice a day into my routine. I don’t even take a multivitamin.”

As she looked into the juicing segment – one that has attracted interest particularly from millennials – she concluded she could improve on what was being offered. The key difference, she said, is in her company’s use of high pressure cold processing in production.

Most juices aren’t cold mixed, and their processes allow impurities to be introduced, she said.

But juices that are cold mixed would only have a three-day shelf life without high pressure processing, or HPP, she explained.

The process subjects bottles of its cold-pressed juices to 87,000 PSI of water pressure – several times the level in the deepest part of the ocean. When a bottle emerges, it’s full of its original nutrients and free of harmful bacteria, Murray said, adding that the process gives Lumi’s juices and shots a shelf life of 50-to-60 days.

“It’s fresh-taste juice just like you would get at the orchard,” Murray said.

The move to eastern Chester County expands production capacity and gives Lumi a better location for wider distribution, said the company founder and CEO, who runs the company with her husband, Matthew Murray, Lumi’s chief brand officer.

While the bulk of the company’s customers are in Virginia and Maryland, Lumi’s juices are sold at Whole Foods and at some local eateries such as the Malvern Buttery, the Terrain Garden Cafe in Glen Mills and Talula’s Daily in Philadelphia.

The goal is to increase the presence of Lumi juices and shots in the many coffee shops and cafés in the region such as West Chester while building on the supermarket business and another interesting market: professional sports teams.

Lumi has 40 professional sports teams providing the juices to their athletes and the interest is only increasing.

“These sports leagues typically have 32 teams each and they all have nutritionists now who are educating their players,” Matthew Murray noted. “We think there’s a lot more opportunity there.”

Other markets with good potential, both local and national, Hillary Murray said, are corporate lunchrooms and college dining halls.

“There are tons of them here in Chester County and the area,” she noted. “We would love to work with them.”

SUBMITTED PHOTO Hillary Murray, founder and CEO of Lumi Juice, has moved the company from Charlottesville, Va. to Malvern.

SUBMITTED PHOTO Some of the products made by Lumi Juice, which recently moved its operation to the Malvern area.