Riverwards Produce has a viral smoothie counter, thanks to its $8 ‘Erewhon dupes’

Every Saturday, lines wrap around the aisles of Riverwards Produce in Old City as customers wait for what some Philly content creators describe as “Erewhon dupes”: 16-ounce to-go cups lined with coconut cream clouds and filled with vibrant lime-ginger-pineapple or mango-cardamon-honey smoothie blends.

Erewhon is a Los Angeles-based health food grocer that has been selling impossibly expensive produce and debatable health food cures since 1969. It became a cultural phenomenon in 2022, when the store’s tonic bar began collaborating with celebrities like Hailey Bieber and Pennsylvania’s own Sabrina Carpenter on bright, blended concoctions that promise to make your skin better or your gut healthier. Clocking in between $13 and $23, Erewhon’s smoothies are both a wealth signifier and a fashion accessory, creating a frenzy to find the next best smoothie “dupe” or knockoff.

All of Riverwards’ smoothies — which can only be found at the 146 N. Bread Street store — cost less than $9.00, but are made with touches that make them feel expensive: Baristas etch flowers into the top with a toothpick and fold the smoothies into the cups like a parfait, drizzling the sides with syrups made in-house.

“Customers love to photograph them,” said Jaden Kowal, Riverwards’ smoothie bar supervisor, who leads recipe development. “They take their phones out immediately to take a photo. It’s rewarding to see.”

The smoothie menu is small, with only four permanent options: The Powerlunch, a cold brew and banana smoothie sweetened with cocoa nibs and local honey; a mango-centric drink called the Sassy Lassi; the Miami Vice, a pineapple and strawberry blend thickened with coconut cream; and the Banana Tahini, named after its main ingredients.

Specials also cycle through seasonally. When the Inquirer visited at the end of March, a green smoothie called the Tipsy Leprechaun was on offer. Inspired by a Moscow Mule, it tasted “healthy” but also like half-melted lime sorbet.

“This isn’t Jamba Juice. This isn’t syrup and powders that are filled with preservatives,” Riverwards owner Vincent Finazzo said. “The ingredients in the smoothie are in the names.”

Brynn Kantrowitz, of Ambler, was among the first to publicly call Riverwards “the Erewhon of Philly.” She made the declaration in a TikTok of she and her sister trying the store’s smoothies that’s been viewed over 134,000 times since it was posted in January.

Kantrowitz said Riverwards’ smoothies are “smaller, cheaper, and equivalent” in taste to the Erewhon one she tried while visiting Los Angeles last May.

“It’s kind of hectic. It’s just a supermarket, but when you’re in there you feel overwhelmed,” Kantrowitz said of Erewhon. Riverwards “is just as aesthetically pleasing, but way more normal.”

Finazzo bristles at the Erewhon comparisons. “There’s an elitist connotation that comes with Erewhon that kind of bothers me,” he said. “For us, it’s about getting as many smoothies out as possible. Price-gouging is not our goal.”

The bar serves now serves up to 100 smoothies a day, Kowal said, and lines can clog the aisles of the store before 9 a.m. or during lunch hours.

The smoothie bar opened in 2022 inside the second location of the Fishtown boutique grocer known for cutting out the middlemen to lower the price of farm-fresh produce. Finazzo said the bar started as a way to reduce food waste and highlight seasonal produce, but took off in April 2024 when Riverwards began to collaborate with small businesses on limited edition smoothies — not unlike Erewhon’s celebrity partnerships.

The grocer’s initial partnership was with “community first” Pilates and sculpt studio Together on back-to-back smoothies. The first was the Better Together, a cherry smoothie blended with banana, avocado, dates, Greek yogurt, almond milk, and powdered bovine colostrum, a fluid cows produce after birth that may boost immunity. The second — called the Blue Zone — was a standard blueberry smoothie mixed with spirulina, a nutrient-dense algae that turns beverages bright blue.

Both were inspired by Erewhon, said Together founder Kate Connelly.

The upscale Los Angeles grocery store is “like my church,” she said.

The collaboration was so successful it had Together clients calling Riverwards after classes to ensure the Erewhon dupes hadn’t sold out yet, Connelly said.

It’s hard to trace whether buying a smoothie — or even seeing one online — converted anyone into a regular at Together, said Connelly. For her, working with Riverwards was mostly about being a good neighbor.

“I wanted people to be able to say, ‘Oh Together? Those are good people,‘” Connelly said.

The same goes for Erin Porsia and Josie DiCarlo, the co-founders of Barnet Fair, an Old City hair salon that wrapped up its Riverwards collaboration at the end of March. Called the Pinky Swear, their smoothie mixes kefir, avocado, pineapple, honey, and cherry juice with collagen, a trendy skin health supplement. On TikTok, Riverwards customers show off the Barnet Fair stickers on their cups.

“It’s good for the neighborhood if everybody cross-promotes each other,” said Porsia. “We’re not the only reason to be here.”

Connelly believes the current blended boom has to do as much with Erewhon as with an overall shift toward wellness culture and personal optimization as a hobby. Generation Z are choosing wellness club memberships over nights out and eschewing alcohol in favor of sober-curious functional beverages. They’re mouth-taping in hopes of better sleep and telling their friends to do low-impact workouts with them to avoid cortisol spikes.

The all-consuming concept of wellness can perhaps make any pretty smoothie feel like an Erewhon smoothie, so long as it’s consumed with the same intention: To better yourself. And to post about it.

“The new happy hour is Pilates and a smoothie,” Connelly said. “We’re not really in a culture where everyone is dying to meet at the bar.”