On Thursday, Oct 22, Chandler Forsythe was walking past 644 Broadway, at Bleecker, when he saw a canvas awning with one word on it: Erewhon. Forsythe, who runs operations and community for the NoHo Business Improvement District, told the New York Post he “stopped in my tracks.” Someone posted the sighting. The awning got rolled back up. By the next morning, a Post photographer found nothing left to shoot.
The space had been the PlantShed café and florist, tucked inside a Kith women’s boutique that sells $1,500 jackets. PlantShed closed last month, and Kith papered the windows right after. Property people in the district told Forsythe it would become an Erewhon smoothie counter and café on a long-term lease, and that the plan is to stay. Neither Erewhon nor Kith answered the Post. Forsythe’s own read on the line: in the first few weeks, maybe the first few months, he would not be surprised to see people wait an hour for a smoothie.
So before anybody on Broadway hands an hour of their Saturday to a cup, here is what is actually in it.
The Strawberry Glaze Skin is pink, thick and about $20. Photo: Pexels.
Erewhon is a Los Angeles grocery chain that turned the smoothie into a status object. The drink that did it is the Strawberry Glaze Skin, the pink one that launched with Hailey Bieber’s name on it. Food Network had it at $17 in May 2024. Time Out Los Angeles paid $19 for it that August, when it ranked every smoothie on Erewhon’s menu. A year later Chowhound was calling it “the viral $20” smoothie. Erewhon has since dropped Bieber’s name from the cup and its website, People reported, after her deal ended. The drink stayed. So did the price.
Plenty on that menu costs more. Food Network put Erewhon’s regular smoothies at $11 to $21 in 2024, with the celebrity collaborations above that: Kendall Jenner’s peaches and cream drink went out at $23. Time Out’s ranking put a $23 Sabrina Carpenter smoothie at number one. The line is part of the product, too. When Erewhon opened its 11th store, in West Hollywood, this February, shoppers showed up at 6 a.m. and fans waited three hours outside, the California Post reported.
New York has had exactly one Erewhon counter, and most people cannot walk into it. It is a tonic bar inside Kith Ivy, the padel club Kith founder Ronnie Fieg opened at 120 Leroy Street in the West Village. Time Out reported the price of entry: a $36,000 initiation fee, plus $7,000 a year in dues. KTLA reported it as the first Erewhon tonic bar outside Los Angeles. Broadway would be the first one a regular New Yorker can walk up to. When Time Out New York tasted the club versions last November, it summed up the genre as “$20 social-media-ready smoothies that sometimes taste grassy.”
The only Erewhon counter in New York so far sits inside a padel club with a $36,000 initiation fee. Photo: Pexels.
ELEVEN INGREDIENTS, STRAIGHT FROM EREWHON’S OWN LABEL, AND WHAT THE FRUIT COSTS AT A SUPERMARKET
Erewhon prints the recipe. Its own shop page lists eleven ingredients for the Strawberry Glaze Skin, in this order: organic almond milk, organic banana, organic strawberries, organic avocado, organic dates, organic maple syrup, grass-fed vanilla collagen, vanilla stevia, sea moss, organic coconut cream and an organic strawberry glaze. Time Out’s 2024 tasting lists the same build, and its verdict was that the thing is “kind of giving strawberry milkshake.”
Four of those eleven are fruit, and fruit has a public price. The USDA’s Economic Research Service publishes average retail prices built from supermarket scanner data. The latest year is 2023, and the numbers are national averages for conventional produce. Fresh strawberries ran $3.08 a pound, about $1.05 a cup. Bananas ran 61 cents a pound, about 31 cents a cup. Avocados ran $2.26 a pound, about 98 cents a cup. Dried dates ran $5.89 a pound. Bananas have barely moved since: the Bureau of Labor Statistics had them at 65.6 cents a pound in September 2026.
Erewhon does not publish portions, so here are ours, stated plainly so you can redo the math yourself. Say one full cup of strawberries, half a banana, a quarter cup of avocado and two dates. At USDA averages that comes to about $1.05, 16 cents, 24 cents and about 60 cents. Call it two dollars of fruit. Use a whole banana and you add 16 cents. Add a second cup of berries and you add about a dollar. Organic costs more, and this USDA series does not break organic out, so double the whole thing for organic and the fruit still lands around four dollars.
Strawberries, banana, avocado and dates: the fruit in the cup runs about $2 at USDA supermarket averages. Photo: Pexels.
EREWHON SELLS THE SAME INGREDIENTS AS A KIT, AND IT COSTS MORE THAN THE DRINK
The other seven ingredients are where Erewhon’s pitch lives: almond milk, maple syrup, vanilla collagen, stevia, sea moss, coconut cream and the glaze. Those swing too widely by brand and size to price against a single label, so we did not try. Erewhon priced them for us.
On its shipping site, Erewhon sells a Strawberry Glaze Skin Smoothie Kit for $100. It makes four smoothies. It arrives pre-portioned, with a carton of MALK organic almond milk and four Erewhon cups, and promises the same look, taste and texture as the in-store drink. That is $25 a smoothie, and you do the blending, the pouring and the dishes. At the counter, somebody else does all three for about $20.
Read that twice. Erewhon charges more for the ingredients than for the finished drink. The price on the cup was never built up from the fruit. It is a number the brand sets and the line confirms, and it climbs a dollar or two at a time because people keep paying it.
Copycats have tested that number. Chowhound found a D.C. chain, South Block, selling a $10 version of the strawberry smoothie, and Sprouts selling a near-identical take on Erewhon’s Coconut Cloud for $7. Same fruit, same blender, a third to half the price. None of them comes in the cup.
WHAT THE REST OF YOUR TWENTY DOLLARS BUYS: THE NAME, THE CUP AND THE LINE
A counter has real costs beyond the cup: rent, staff, blenders, waste. Erewhon does not share its numbers, and we will not guess at them. But those costs do not explain why the parts sell for more than the drink. So the receipt for a $20 Strawberry Glaze Skin reads something like this: about two dollars of fruit at supermarket prices, a run of add-ins Erewhon values highly enough to charge $25 a serving for the set, and everything else. Everything else is the name on the cup, the photo you take of it, and the hour you stood outside to get it.
NoHo is the right block for that sale. The median apartment in the neighborhood goes for $3.2 million, the Post noted, citing PropertyShark. The counter would sit inside a store that sells $1,500 jackets. Forsythe did not sound worried about the crowd. He told the Post that people downtown are wary of more lines, but that lines are simply part of downtown life now, and that Kith works hard to manage its own.
NoHo’s business district expects lines of up to an hour in the first weeks. Photo: Pexels.
That is the deal on offer at Broadway and Bleecker, if it opens. Erewhon has not confirmed the lease, the date or the menu, and nobody has said whether New York prices will match Los Angeles. What is on the record is the recipe and the price, and the two have very little to do with each other.
Wait an hour for one if you want the cup. Just know what you are buying. The fruit in a $20 Erewhon smoothie costs about two dollars. Erewhon’s own kit says the ingredients are worth more than the drink. The gap between those two numbers is the line you are standing in, and it is the one thing nobody can blend at home. What Erewhon is selling on Broadway is the wait.
SOURCING
Photos: Pexels.
