Lumi Juice was founded in April 2013 in Charlottesville, Virginia, by Hillary Lewis, a second-year MBA student at the Darden School of Business. Lewis’s vision was to build a fully functioning manufacturing facility using a high-pressure processing machine instead of heat pasteurization, and to design and bring to market a new line of cold-pressed juices. The goal itself and estimated time to market were ambitious: Lewis wanted to put a product on the shelves of a major national retailer as soon as possible, using a limited initial investment of $500,000 and only two full-time employees. This case challenges students to take a project management approach in determining when and how to go about setting the product launch. This case has been used at Darden in an elective on project management.
