Alnastazia Watson aiming to build healthier lives with clean cuisine

Through her community work, Alnastazia Watson recognised a significant gap in the market for healthy juices. This realisation led the entrepreneur at heart, who already owns a wax business, The Waxperts Ja, to take on a new business challenge, dubbed clean cuisine, in 2024.

She started clean cuisine through a pilot project in April and officially launched in November to transform how Jamaicans view healthy eating.

“Healthy eating goes beyond salmon and quinoa and stuff like that. There are a lot of misconceptions as it relates to the word ‘diet’. What I really want to do is change how Jamaicans view food. I really want to help Jamaicans understand the importance of having a healthy relationship with food,” Watson told Food, in an interview on Tuesday.

“We Jamaicans love the starch; the heavy rice and boiled food, [but] one step at a time, we are trying to change the narrative and we want to start with our kids. When we think about clean., [I want us to think about] living longer, becoming grandparents; fuelling them to become the best versions of themselves. I feel like if every Jamaican takes this approach or each one reach one, we can build a better country, one bottle at a time,” she said.

With this in mind, Watson created an all-natural green juice.

“Clean. is more than just a product,” she shared. “The way how it really and truly came about was out of a need that I would have identified a few years [ago]. I have over 10 years of experience in community development, so I’ve done a lot of grassroots work, especially with young people. Through that, I was able to identify a lot of the social gaps that we have, and one of the major gaps that I identified was nutrition, especially in low-income households.”

Later, when her mother, Tanya Hines, fell ill, having experienced a pulmonary embolism, she was inspired to take her health journey a step further. Her mother had always been a supporter of her push for more healthy juices on the market. And as she recovered, eventually returning to the classroom, Watson realised even more the connection between diet and overall health.

She knew it was time to get her certification in nutrition and kick-start the business based on what she learnt during that recovery process.

“It was through that I got a very scary wake-up call in life regarding my health and wellness, and I went ahead and I got certified through [the] International Sports Sciences Association as a certified nutritionist, and it was through that, that I realised that when you look at the Jamaican market, we really don’t have [many] healthy juice options, so we saw a little niche area that we could fill that gap, so if you look at our bottle, it’s 100 per cent natural, no sugar added and preservatives,” Watson told Food.

“So you are getting the best in terms of quality of ingredients,” she added.

Clean.’s flagship green machine is now available on the shelves of restaurants such as Pimento’s at Devon House and Pink Apron.

This year Watson is looking to expand beyond the beverage. “What we have on the table for 2025, is to go beyond just juice, but to do some community work. We are aiming to find a primary school this year and to work with them to develop a school feeding programme,” Watson told Food, adding that a percentage of the business’s profits would go towards the programme.

“We see where we have the resources that we can be able to fill even if it is a small gap, to see how best we can give back to the community. Community development is a big thing for us because the ingredients that we use are from our local farmers,” Watson said.

“Really and truly, what we want to do is to change the narrative of how Jamaicans think about and treat food and nutrition. When we think about clean., we think about fuelling the future of Jamaica, especially our young kids,” she said.

ainsworth.morris@gleanerjm.com