Acai Replaces Wheatgrass in Blenders at Juice Bars

Sitting at a cafe table in a chic Manhattan fitness club, Kacy Duke takes a sip of a purplish-pink smoothie made with bananas, juices and acai, a fruit from the Amazon that fans say helps boost energy and lower cholesterol. "This is good," says Ms. Duke, a personal trainer who drinks about six of them a week.

Wheatgrass, protein shakes -- so 2002. At juice bars and health stores around the country, the hip new taste is acai, (pronounced ah-sigh-EE) a grape-size, deep-purple berry that grows atop
palm trees in the Brazilian jungle. In the two years since it hit the U.S., sales have jumped fivefold to $2.5 million. "People drive out of their way to get it," says Brandon Gough, the company's vice president of marketing. Even non-health types are catching on: Restaurants are
serving it with dinner entrées.

Fans say the fruit (which comes to the U.S. as frozen pulp) not only tastes good, but also is good for you -- packed with anthocyanins, the same antioxidants that give red wine its health benefits. And, in a hat trick of health-bar chic, it's good for the Amazon, too, because it's collected by local families who can earn as much as $1,000 during the December-to-August harvest season (twice as much as they can usually make). "It gives them income and another land use besides cutting down the trees and raising cattle," says Chris Kilham, who teaches ethno botany at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst.

Of course, the fruit is just the latest exotic newcomer looking for a place in U.S. produce aisles -- remember the star fruit? And the acai's newfound cachet would probably take a lot of Brazilians by surprise: There, acai, whose taste has been likened to blueberry with a hint of chocolate, typically is eaten as a pudding like mush over bananas for breakfast.

As to the health claims: "It is very nutritional," says Elisabetta Politi, a nutritionist with the Duke University Diet and Fitness Center in Durham, N.C. Ms. Duke, who not only drinks the stuff, but also has mixed it into a homemade mask for her skin. "I thought because of all of the antioxidants, it would be good," she says. (The result: "I glowed," she says.)

By Tatiana Boncompagni