Just Juice

William Fulton credits Second Harvest Food Bank of Northwest North Carolina’s Providence Culinary Training with helping him turn his vision for fresh juice blends into a business.

“If I had to sum it all up in one word, it would be community,” said Fulton, creator and owner of The Jugo Bar.

Fulton was thriving as a digital specialist for a company serving newspapers across North Carolina. Then several experiences converged to spark a career change:

• He had grown up in Winston-Salem’s Happy Hill Gardens community drinking sugary drink mixes. As an adult, he became more attentive to their ingredients.

• While traveling in France and Morocco, he encountered different approaches to food and eating.

• After his first grandson was born, he began reading the ingredient labels on the baby’s food.

  
  

“That was the pivotal moment for me,” he said. “I did not want my grandson to have those things. I just decided one day I wanted to start making juice. I wanted something fresh without those dyes and chemicals.”

Soon afterward, he sampled watermelon juice at a grocery store and was disappointed that it neither tasted nor smelled like watermelon.

“I left there with two seeded watermelons,” he said. Fulton began experimenting with watermelon juice at his home in King. When he offered his first batch for sale, it sold out.

That early response gave him the confidence to give two weeks’ notice at work. “I’m going to culinary school; I’m going to make juice,” he recalled telling his colleagues. “They laughed at me so hard.”

Fulton enrolled in Second Harvest’s Providence Culinary Training after learning about the program from his cousin, Chef Joseph Abraham. Fulton was vegan at the time and asked for plant-based options during class meals. His instructors challenged him to create the dishes himself.

“I so much believe in the program,” Fulton said. While completing his training, he was also developing recipes for his juices. “I’m blending stuff in my head. I can’t explain it. I’m a very spiritual man. I want to say it was a gift from the Almighty.”

Fulton said the culinary program gave him a strong foundation in food safety, kitchen skills and precise measurement—knowledge that helped him produce consistent juices from one batch to the next.

Fulton’s church, Mount Moriah Outreach Center in Kernersville, led by his brother, Bishop Todd Fulton, allowed him to use its commercial kitchen. He started with lemonades, and his business took off when he began selling at a local farmers market. Today, he has developed 153 juice recipes.

In 2020, Fulton began using the commercial kitchen at the Enterprise Center on Martin Luther King Jr. Drive, where he could produce 600 bottles per batch. As demand grew, he needed more employees and turned again to Second Harvest’s culinary program, hiring graduates and referring prospective employees for training. The Jugo Bar now has brick-and-mortar locations in Winston-Salem and Charlotte, along with three satellite locations. Its clients include hotels and health care organizations.

When Chef Songa Leopold graduated from Providence Culinary Training in 2022, her instructor connected her with Fulton because she was already making juice for herself. She has worked for The Jugo Bar during two periods of expansion and grows some of the herbs Fulton uses in his juices.

“I thought I knew everything about juicing until I met him,” said Leopold, now a client advocacy coordinator with Second Harvest. “He widened my vocabulary.”

“He paid it forward,” she said. Fulton has referred more than a dozen people to Second Harvest’s culinary program and has created opportunities for graduates as his business has grown.

The connections continue in other ways. Fulton provides carrot and beet pulp for muffins baked through the Second Harvest GRACE program, which offers culinary training for people with intellectual and developmental disabilities.

Fulton keeps herbs on his counter in honor of his godmother, an herbalist who taught him about plants and their uses. He is also working with Speas Elementary School, which grows herbs for his juices and uses pulp from his production for compost.

“For me, as a person growing up in Winston-Salem out of the housing projects, to see that I’m able to create change is the biggest thing for me,” he said. He has watched members of his own family replace sugary drinks with fresh fruit juices. “I can’t believe all the doors that have opened up for me. I’m blown away at the amount of support I have.”

Fulton plans to open a restaurant called Chop and Chew in honor of his mother, who kept him inside chopping, peeling—and sampling—fruits and vegetables while other children played outside. He also hopes to make space in his kitchens for other entrepreneurs and for older community members to pass their canning knowledge to younger generations.

“I give thanks to the school for setting me up,” Fulton said. “The name goes a long way. It opened my eyes to a community I didn’t know I had.”