Refurbished Commercial Juicers

Citrus press for oranges, lemons and limes: fastest, simplest and easiest to clean, because it only ever handles halved fruit. Centrifugal for a mixed menu with apples, carrots, beetroot and greens: quick, high yield on hard produce, and it produces a juice best served straight away.

Cold press for yield, texture and a juice that holds up for longer in a bottle, at the cost of speed and a much more involved clean-down. If the business is bottling juice to sell, cold press. If it is pouring to order at a cafe, one of the other two.

A lot, and it is daily work rather than a weekly job. Pulp sets hard, fruit sugar sours, and every part that touches juice has to come apart and be washed on a schedule — filter baskets, blades, augers, chutes and the housing. A juicer that is cleaned at the end of a rush is a different machine from one cleaned at the end of a day.

That is also the main thing to assess on a used machine. Ask what was replaced during the refurbishment, and look at the state of the filter basket and the seals. Build the cleaning time into the roster, because it is labour, not an afterthought.

A commercial machine will, provided it is the right type for the fruit and it is not being asked to run continuously past its duty cycle. The usual bottleneck is not the motor, it is the handling: feeding fruit, emptying pulp and swapping jugs.

If the peak is heavy, two smaller machines usually beat one larger one, because one can be cleaned or cleared while the other runs. Count the juices in the busiest hour and tell us the number rather than the brand you had in mind.

Filter baskets and blades on a centrifugal machine, augers and screens on a cold press, and the seals and the drive coupling on both. On a citrus press it is the cones, the gaskets and the strainer. All are consumables and all should be available for a current trade brand.

Ask us about parts for the exact model before you buy, because a juicer with an unobtainable filter basket has a short life left whatever its condition today. Keep a spare set of the parts you replace most, since they fail mid-service rather than conveniently.

Some juice holds and some does not, and that is set by the type of machine as much as the fruit. Centrifugal juice separates and oxidises fast and is best poured straight away. Cold-pressed juice holds its quality much longer, which is the main reason bottling operations use it.

Whatever you make ahead goes straight into refrigeration, and your own food-safety plan sets how long you can hold it. A refurbished commercial under bench fridge at the counter is the usual answer, so bottles are cold and in reach.

Beside a sink, with bench space on both sides — one side for the fruit going in, the other for the pulp bin and the jugs coming out. A juicer dropped into a gap with nowhere to put the pulp bin will slow the counter down no matter how good the machine is.

Also check the power point and the clearance the product page asks for, and keep the machine away from the edge where a full pulp bin gets knocked. If it is customer-facing, remember a juicer is messy by nature and plan a splash surface behind it, ideally a run of stainless steel benching that wipes down.