Farm flavor: Shake-ups a sweet tradition
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Lindsey Combs makes a lemon shake-up for customers at Gateway%u2019s lemon shake-up fair booth Tuesday. It takes more than 100 volunteers to staff the booth throughout the week.
The lemon shake-ups that fair-goers have been sipping down for 30 years also help pay for local residents’ trips to the doctor and grocery store.
That $4 lemon shake-up from the Gateway Services fair booth raises money for Access Johnson County, the county’s public transportation system.
Fair-goers will buy an estimated 3,500 lemon shake-ups this week, said Dan Mustard, director of operations of Gateway Services.
The beverage is a fair tradition for some people, and its popularity is the reason Gateway continues to make shake-ups despite the amount of work it takes, Mustard said.
Thousands of pounds of sugar, ice and lemon juice and hundreds of volunteers are used to produce a week’s worth of drinks.
Volunteers squeezed 118 gallons of lemon juice last week. About 1,500 pounds of sugar and 4,000 pounds of ice will be used this week.
“We ask ourselves (why we do this) every year; it’s incredibly labor intensive,” he said. “It’s a tradition, a lot of people identify the shake-up with our agency.”
