After months of renovation work that has coincided with full-scale rebranding and capital raise, Green & Tonic is on track to open next week on Burtis Avenue in downtown New Canaan. The purveyor of cold-pressed juices and plant-based foods will undergo a health inspection today, according to Jeffrey Pandolfino—a Greenwich resident and food veteran who owns the business with his wife, Cai—and a few days later hopes to welcome New Canaanites into the new store that also offers smoothies, teas and a variety of breakfast foods, snacks, salads, soups and wraps. “We are super excited to get to New Canaan and the one thing I would say to the people of New Canaan is that I’m sorry it has taken a year to get the store built,” Pandolfino said. The interior work at the shop—the first door on the right as you come down Burtis, formerly an antiques store—has been going on in conjunction with a store design update and rebranding of G&T packaging, logo and labels, he said. “It’s definitely Green & Tonic version 2.0 and we’re excited about that.”
Formerly the owners of an all-natural foods catering business that they sold in 2008, Jeffrey and Cai Pandolfino soon began angling toward what would become Green & Tonic (with storefronts in Greenwich and Darien as well as a Westchester presence) by starting as a cleansing business that has evolved to include food that’s designed to “fuel the active lifestyle,” Jeffrey Pandolfino said, “whether grabbing side salads and using them as a base for dinner, or prepackaged for launch, we work really hard to be a food company, a health casual company that happens to serve a lot of beverages.”
He continued: “Everything in the store is plant-based, so if you want to call it vegan you could but we prefer to say ‘plant-based’ and that doesn’t mean we are necessarily vegans or advocate a 100 percent vegan lifestyle.
