Why Fresh Juice Costs What It Does in Quetta
By Panjtan Juice · Published November 2026
Stand at any juice counter in Quetta and you will hear the same quiet question sooner or later: why does a glass of fresh juice cost what it does? A fresh apple juice is Rs 400, a carrot juice Rs 300, an orange juice Rs 400 and a pomegranate juice Rs 500 at our counter. Those numbers are not picked from the air, and they are not the price of the fruit alone. They are the price of everything it takes to turn raw fruit, bought that morning, into a cold glass pressed in front of you. Here is an honest breakdown.
Most of the Fruit Never Reaches Your Glass
This is the part most customers never see. A kilo of pomegranates looks generous until you press it: the thick rind, the white pith and the pulp that stays behind in the press mean a large share of the weight never becomes juice. Apples lose their core and skin; oranges lose peel and pith; carrots lose their tops and the fibrous ends. Depending on the fruit, roughly a third to a half of what we buy ends up as waste before a single glass is poured. So the price of your glass has to carry the price of the fruit that became juice and the fruit that did not. A shop that quotes a suspiciously cheap glass is usually cutting this corner — watering the juice down, pressing over-ripe fruit, or using yesterday's stock.
Fresh Means Bought Fresh, Every Day
A juice shop cannot buy in bulk like a factory and store fruit for weeks. Fruit bought on Monday that is still sitting on Friday is fruit we would rather throw away than serve. So we buy small and often, from the mandi and from suppliers we trust, and we pay the day's price — which moves with the season, the weather and the trucks coming up from Sindh and Punjab. In winter, Quetta's own apples are plentiful and good; in summer, the fruit we want may have travelled a thousand kilometres to reach us. That daily buying, and the waste when a crate turns faster than expected, is built into every glass.
Labour, Machines and Cold
Fresh juice is made by hand, one order at a time. Somebody washes the fruit, feeds the press or the juicer, strains it, pours it and washes the machine before the next order — because yesterday's pomegranate in today's apple juice is a flavour nobody wants. The machines themselves need blades, sieves and servicing, and the fruit has to stay cold from the mandi to the counter, which means refrigeration running all day in a city where electricity is not cheap. None of this shows up in the glass, but all of it is in the price.
What You Are Actually Paying For
- The fruit itself — bought fresh, in season, at the day's market price.
- The waste — peels, cores, pulp and rind that never become juice.
- The work — washing, pressing, straining and cleaning, order by order.
- The cold chain — refrigeration from market to counter.
- The freshness guarantee — nothing pressed yesterday, nothing served stale.
How to Judge Whether a Glass Is Worth It
Price alone does not tell you much, so judge by the glass in front of you. Is it pressed after you order, or poured from a jug that has been sitting there? Does it taste like the fruit, with no watery thinness and no added sugar taste masking something stale? Does the colour look like the fruit itself — deep red for pomegranate, warm gold for orange? And does the shop smell of fresh fruit rather than old pulp? If the answers are yes, the price is paying for real fruit and real work. If the juice arrives suspiciously fast from a pre-filled jug, you may be paying the same money for a very different product.
Why We Publish Our Prices
We put our prices on the menu and on this blog for a simple reason: a customer who knows what things cost can decide fairly. Our fresh juices are apple Rs 400, carrot Rs 300, orange Rs 400 and pomegranate Rs 500; pineapple juice is priced on the day — ask at the counter, because its market price swings too much to print. Our milkshakes start at banana Rs 250, most flavours are Rs 300, and our ice creams are all Rs 200. If a price ever changes, it changes because the fruit market changed — not because we felt like it.