Former soccer player Steve Spangler is juiced up about new career

Steve Spangler carries around a card in his wallet that lists all the food products that can provoke an allergic reaction in his athletic, 6-foot-3-inch body. The list includes yeast, gluten, dairy products, broccoli, ginger, and cabbage.

When he opens, in a few months, a fresh juice cafe called Simple Science Juices in the former Villa Capri location at 8126 Metcalf, he’ll be making several juices with ginger and a few with broccoli. He now loves those ingredients: “I was able to slowly add those things back into my diet after I gave up dairy, yeast and gluten.”

Ginger is already a primary ingredient in the most popular juices that Spangler creates for the 11 different cold-pressed Simple Science Juices he delivers every day to homes and businesses in the metro. That includes his best-selling Nucleus beverage that blends cucumber, pineapple, kale, ginger and lemon juices — and cayenne pepper. The jade-colored juice product tastes remarkably fresh but needs to be imbibed relatively quickly. Spangler’s fresh juice drinks are unpasteurized and preservative-free.

The 26-year-old Spangler doesn’t look like he was ever ill a moment in his life, but he insists that he was a sickly kid, constantly battling sinus infections. Spangler’s allergies, he says, were at their worst several years ago, when he moved to Kansas City as a hopeful young soccer player. (Spangler was invited by Sporting Kansas City to try out for the team in 2012. He trained with the club for a time but didn’t stay on for long.) His symptoms included chronic sinus infections and feeling constantly tired.

“One doctor told me,” Spangler says, ‘These are the cards you’ve been dealt. You’ll have to live with this.’ But that was not how I intended to lead the rest of my life.”

Spangler says a viewing of the 2010 documentary film Fat, Sick & Nearly Dead, about a man’s effort to reclaim his health through a diet of fruit and vegetable juices, changed his life: “I went out and bought a juicer and started experimenting.”

That first juicer was an inexpensive Jack LaLanne model. Spangler later turned to a more sophisticated cold-press juicer as he built up his juice delivery business. He’s currently waiting on the $14,000 Freshly Squeezed 12 machine that he’ll be installing in his new business, a combination fresh-juice factory, cafe (he’ll be offering a limited selection of salads, vegetable trays with dipping sauces, wraps and protein balls) and hangout in an iconic restaurant building dating back to the early 1960s.

“We had to gut the space,” Spangler says, “to bring it up to code. Our new ADA-compliant  bathrooms alone will cost $8,000 each.”

Spangler is opening the business with an investor, Ken Martin, a New York-based banker and owner of several coffee shops. “My college degree is in communications and psychology, so I’m glad to have a partner with a finance background.”

“This neighborhood has a lot of potential,” Spangler says. “It’s close to the Overland Park Farmers Market, where we plan to sell our juices this summer, and near the Matt Ross Community Center. There are also luxury condos scheduled to be built across Metcalf, just north of here.”

Spangler says he plans to introduce one more of his bottled beverages — which retail for $8.50 for a 16-ounce bottle; delivery is free in the Kansas City metro — before the end of the year. Like all of his beverages, it will have an unsexy, scientific name. The new drink, to be called Calcify, will blend the juices of spinach, dandelion greens, avocado, cilantro, celery, Granny Smith apples and lemon.

“It tastes great,” Spangler says. “And it’s loaded with calcium.”