Frequently Asked Questions

We’re a group of people who all know and care about good quality fruit and ingredients. A collective of growers, foodies, buyers and technical experts all united by the desire to make great tasting drinks. We’ve been pressing fruit for the last 30 years. It all began with the humble apple, and we’ve been growing ever since. Today, our drinks are inspired by ingredients straight from the great British kitchen garden, from rhubarb to elderflower. We started Cawston Press because we were frustrated by the lack of quality soft drinks made from natural ingredients, without the preservatives and other nasties that gave soft drinks a bad name. We use simple ingredients, picked at their peak then pressed into a can or a carton. Simple, really.

You’ll find us in most of the big supermarkets, including Tesco, Waitrose, Sainsburys, Booths, Asda, Coop, Morrisons, Amazon and Ocado. However you’re just as likely to spot us in health food shops, restaurants, cafés, pubs and delis up and down the UK too.

Yes, you’ll find us in more than 20 countries around the world. If you’re interested in selling our drinks, email us at info@cawstonpress.com

Our sparkling 330ml cans all come under 90 calories and our Fruit Waters are 54 calories per carton. On the one hand, people find the ‘low calorie’, ‘no added sugar’ promise of diet drinks enticing. On the other, they still like to see real ingredients that they know and understand. Zero or low calories has normally been reached through artificial means so we’ve never seen calories as ‘dirty’, or the root of all evils. Quite the opposite. We’ve always believed natural is best and that, as with most of life’s great pleasures, it’s just a question of moderation.

Because calories are not the enemy. Every natural ingredient on this humble planet contains calories, from beansprouts to broccoli. There’s nothing inherently evil or ‘dirty’ about them. They give us energy. We literally can’t live without them. And the truth is, you can’t make something zero calorie without resorting to some form of jiggery-pokery. To make our drinks zero calories, we’d have to resort to fake sugars or sweeteners – or produce drinks that taste totally worthy. And neither option feels us. If we’re going to put our name on something, it has to be two things: made with real ingredients and utterly delicious. Those are the two red lines we will never, ever cross.

Absolutely. None of our ingredients come from animals, in any shape or form. And they’re all naturally caffeine-free, sodium-free and gluten-free, with no GM ingredients.

Our Fruit Waters are perfect for younger palates and School-Approved too. They’re just pressed juice and water – with absolutely no added sugar or artificial sweeteners.

We tried and tested lots of different ingredients in a bid to make the best tasting drinks we could. We went around in circles and came back to what we’ve always known – that nature does it best. And as a business with 30 years of experience pressing apples the answer was simple: fruit juice, of course. By using pressed juice and not added sugar or artificial sweeteners we’ve believe we’ve found the perfect ‘sweet spot’ that people are looking for.

We only ever use pressed juice so expect to find some natural sediment. This is just small bits of our natural ingredients such as apple, rhubarb or lemon. Think of it as the sediment you would find in a fine wine. It is perfectly safe to drink just slowly rotate the bottles before opening to release the flavour… and enjoy! You can also decant the drink if you would prefer not to drink the sediment.

We want to keep creating drinks we love to drink ourselves and delicious taste just isn’t something we are willing to compromise on. Artificial sweeteners mask the taste of our fruit juice and they just aren’t us. We tried Stevia and, although we liked that it was a natural ingredient, it had an odd after taste that none of us liked so we ruled it out pretty early on.

The extracts we use are developed just for us and are made using natural ingredients and traditional cooking methods to enhance the flavours of our pressed juice in a more rounded and impactful way.

Yes – absolutely. All our cans, cartons, plastic caps, bottles and straws are made from recyclable materials. Most councils in the UK recycle now, only a handful don’t. Assuming they are collecting, sorting and sending to the correct recycling plants across the country, our straws and cartons are recyclable. But it’s a team effort and we need your help too. All you need to do is push the straw all the way into the carton and put in the correct recycling bin when you’re done. If you’re not sure about what can or can’t be recycled in your area, please talk to your local council.

Thanks to Sir David and Greta, everyone’s talking and thinking more about plastic packaging. Rightly so. It’s certainly something that’s always played on our minds here at Cawston HQ. Our cans, cartons, trays, straws and caps are all made from recyclable materials and we’re proud of that. However some of our shoppers have been asking us to swap the plastic wrap on our multipacks for card, so we wanted to share our thoughts with you on that. While it’s true that card is easier to recycle, deforestation is one of the biggest contributors to global warming and species extinction. And it also takes twice the energy, 4 times the water and 3 times the carbon to produce. Some companies are switching to compostable plastic. Trouble is, it needs to be sorted and recycled separately from other plastics, which most people don’t realise. Even just one rogue piece can spoil a whole batch. Bioplastics are another option. But while they do breakdown faster, some never fully break down. The truth is, there’s no silver bullet. Yet. But if an environmentally friendlier option comes along, we’ll be the first to consider it. We’re working on some exciting new developments in terms of the materials and amount of packaging we use. We’re not there yet but our work is never done.

150ml fruit juice is 1 of your five a day and the NHS recommends you drink this amount each day as part of a healthy diet. We would however never recommend completely replacing whole fresh fruit and vegetables for fruit juice. Fruit and vegetables when eaten in their usual whole form have more vitamins, minerals and fibre than fruit juice.

Our recipes are just that – recipes, created in a kitchen, not a lab but we get this question a lot, so let’s talk science for just a moment. ‘Concentrate’ is made by heating juice under a vacuum, to remove up to 80% of the water. Then enzymes are added, to make it clear rather than cloudy. This whole process changes the colour and flavour of the juice. Before it’s bottled and sold, the water is added back in, along with extra flavours to make up for the ones that were lost. ‘Not from concentrate’ juice (like ours), is made just by pressing the fruit. That’s it. We just flash pasteurise it to kill off the natural yeasts and bacteria, so far more of the flavour and goodness stays in. We think that when you have the best ingredients, they should be handled with care. The more you process them, the less you can taste their true flavour. That’s why we only use pressed fruit juice. Nothing else comes close.

The only test our ingredients have to pass is a taste test, not a beauty parade. We don’t care if it’s too big or a bit wonky. All that matters to us is that we’re making the best tasting drinks we can. And if we can stop perfectly good food going to waste at the same time, then that makes us happy too.

Form more information please read

 The European Union’s Single-Use Plastics Directive includes a requirement for all single-use beverage containers to come with their caps attached by July 2024 to help ensure the caps are disposed of and recycled together with the rest of the pack. Even the UK is outside the EU most manufacturers are changing to tethered caps to meet the EU rules.
Cawston Press has always recommended putting the cap back on your rinsed and squashed empty carton, so the new tethered cap will just help with that. Putting the cap back on helps to reduce accidental littering and gets more plastic into the recycling stream

 Please recycle the carton as normal with the cap on. The cap assembly will be separated from the carton in the recycling plant and the high-density polyethylene (HDPE) plastic in it can then be sorted for plastic recycling and made into other products (like furniture and building materials).

The cap is made of polyethylene (PE) plastic and mount is made of polypropylene (PP) plastic.

We are continuing to sell all our cartons with the non-tethered caps, but our factory is now producing 100% cartons with tethered caps so there will be a gradual transition to the new caps.

(if it somehow detaches) Yes – please recycle as normal