When the Juice Collective opened Gray Street across from the LECOM Arena, LaTeka Cooke-Davis brought a wealth of knowledge and experience to the enterprise. She’d begun learning about juice years earlier in Los Angeles, when she was diagnosed with a brain tumor and her father, a bishop, thought juices would help her heal. She researched the properties of fruits, veggies, herbs, and spices and found combinations that supported health. In April 2020, the West Coast branch of her family moved to Elmira.

A few months later, her father was diagnosed with multiple myeloma. “It caused me to do further research,” LaTeka says. “I’m passionate about making people feel better.” Soon her father’s cancer progressed beyond treatment.

“As my father was leaving this world, the guidance he shared with me was that what I had been learning wasn’t meant just for him. He encouraged me to share it with others, which is exactly what I’m doing through the Juice Collective,” she says, adding that juice became “my canvas, painted with the colors of home, love, and diverse flavors.”

In Elmira, LaTeka, who attended business school and previously worked in insurance, made juices for friends and her church family. Word spread and she was soon delivering juices to the wider community. After a successful surgery to remove her tumor, she used juice blends to maintain her own good health, then began offering them at festivals and pop-ups. She got connected to Incubatorworks, a networking program for new entrepreneurs. They helped her find her first space, which was in the Arnot Mall. She moved to her downtown location in early May 2024. She gets help from her husband, John Anthony Davis, her mother, Aurellia Cooke, who is a nurse and owned several restaurants in LA, her nieces Ari and Jay, and sometimes her brother, Corey Cooke, who is a pastor, Elmira council member (Second District), composer, and musician.

In addition to cold-pressed juices combining fruits and vegetables with proven nutritional value and healing properties, LaTeka sources and uses lesser-known ingredients like sea moss (“It has ninety-two minerals and gives natural energy,” she says) and the tropical fruit soursop (“It’s a medicinal fruit that kills cancer and rebuilds cells”). Not sure what to order? Try a “Wellness shot”—a small serving of a juice blend, turmeric, pepper, and ginger. Many of the Juice Collective’s original customers come here to stock up on quantities of juice after cancer treatments at Arnot Ogden Medical Center’s Falck Cancer Center, finding them a good nutritional support when appetite and energy flag. Now a larger audience comes for juice, soup, vegan grab-and-go wraps, and more. The weekly specials are posted on Facebook along with menu staples like build your own acai bowl, tarragon chicken salad sandwich, marry me chicken soup (LaTeka’s take on a classic dish), vegan zupa Toscana, and banana pudding.

Yes, banana pudding.

“People really love our banana pudding,” LaTeka says. “I try to make forty pounds every few days.”

She also offers bento boxes, each with a full sandwich, a pint of soup, honey corn bread, and a drink for twenty bucks. It’s a popular and healthy grab-and-go, she says.

Current Juice Collective hours are 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. Wednesday through Saturday, but check thejuicecollectiveny.com, Facebook, or call (607) 442-6071 for changes as LaTeka hopes to expand the days and times she’s open. She’s also working on a subscription service “for people who can’t reach us,” so stay tuned for that.