At Kagome, our guiding principle is what we call Katsu-Sai - activating the natural power of fruits and vegetables and making these powers available to you. Doing so means respecting nature's design. We don't try to improve nature, nor take anything away. We remain true to that principle at every stage of the development of our juices.
Katsu-Sai
Our Ingredients
It starts with the seeds. All seeds are not equal. In the hundred years Kagome has been nurturing vegetables, we have built a private seed bank that now has some 6,500 varieties of tomato, each with its own qualities and best uses.
The tomatoes selected for our juices, for example, have delicious fresh flavor, a texture that makes the tomato ideal for juicing, and a bright red color. Lycopene gives tomatoes their red color, and we choose the brightest red tomatoes. (We hope you'll visit our Nature's Color Wheel™ page to learn more about the good things eating a spectrum of colorful veggies can do for you.)
The vegetables we use in our juices are grown around the world, in climates ideal for their proper development. The soil our vegetables are grown in is carefully monitored to ensure the vegetables enjoy ideal growing conditions. And the plants are carefully tended, resulting in vegetables of exceptional color and flavor.
We choose our ingredients based on their freshness and color - a sign of healthful phytonutrients - and other qualities. This can mean being very choosy; for example, winter carrots (which we use in our carrot juice) tend to be more flavorful, sweeter and make better fresh juice.
Activating Our Fruits & Vegetables
To get the most out of these vegetables, Kagome has pioneered special processes that leave the color and flavor of the vegetables as true to nature as possible while ensuring strict quality standards.
We then process the fruits and vegetables in ways that leave flavor and color intact. We extract the juice of tomatoes using our proprietary Reverse Osmosis process. This unique process (and others we have developed) retains the colors, flavors and phytonutrients naturally found in tomatoes. The bright red color and fresh flavor of tomatoes can be cooked out at high heat. So our tomato puree (the preliminary stage of making tomato juice) is developed using low-heat processes.
There's another benefit to these processes; they leave the delicious flavor of these vegetables intact. So every bottle of Kagome will taste alive, fresh and true-to-nature.
Experience growing your own tomato seedling. Take our interactive Tomato Quiz to test your gardening knowledge and get some great tips for growing tomatoes.
Bringing Nature's Power to You
Finally, in mixing and preparing our juices, we add no sugar, artificial flavors or preservatives. Natural flavors, including ginger and lime are added sparingly to spice flavor. Even adding minerals or other artificial fortifications is avoided, since that would change the goodness that nature has already created.
The juice you get is true to nature - and is even superior to the raw vegetable when it comes to nutrient absorption. Kagome research has shown that your body can absorb and use the nutrients and phytonutrients in fruits and vegetables more easily when they are in the form of 100% juice than eating them raw.
Enjoy Kagome juices. And Live True.