It appeals to tea lovers and those who’ve been turned off by kombucha in the past.” “We don’t add any artificial flavors or additional juices. “We concentrate on tea-forward kombucha, says CEO Joe Mayol. “They tend to be a younger generation that does not like soda or sugary drinks and has a more adventurous palate that fits the flavor profile of traditional raw kombucha.”Īmong the newer brands is Camellia Grove, a regional kombucha made in Oregon. The core kombucha consumer is 25 to 45 years old, usually consumes a diet high in plant-based foods, and exercises routinely, Dave says. (See feature article on fermented foods on page 32.) The growing popularity of fermented foods in general also is helping buoy kombucha. But kombucha kept gaining on younger consumers who were proving more and more adventurous. Many other new, nutritious beverages appeared over the past 15 years, giving health-minded Americans lots of options when it comes to turning wasted beverage calories into health-boosting ones. Early adopters were drawn to its potential health benefits, which advocates say include the actions of antioxidants, the bacteria-killing advantages of acetic acid, and cutting the risk of heart disease, Type 2 diabetes, and even cancer. Kombucha is essentially a fermented tea drink whose nutritional efficacy comes from what’s known as a SCOBY, short for “symbiotic colony of bacteria and yeast.” In Synergy and nearly all early versions of kombucha, this colony manifested in an unsightly blob referred to as the “mother,” which floats in the drink. “Kombucha has increasingly become mainstream, but it remains a niche category-considerably smaller than most of the mainstream beverage categories,” says Gary Hemphill, Beverage Marketing’s managing director. And some analysts dispute that kombucha ever truly will become a widely popular beverage in the United States. Sales growth has slowed considerably over the last couple of years, according to Beverage Marketing Corp.
Playful flavor varieties, various treatments of the bacterial blob that floats in traditional kombucha, and even “hard” interpretations that lean into kombucha’s natural alcohol content are all contributing to the continued growth of a beverage that has helped spark a healthfulness revolution in what Americans drink. Since entrepreneur GT Dave essentially created the category in the United States with Synergy kombucha in 1995, it’s grown to a $1.3 billion market that has sucked in even giants such as PepsiCo and Coca-Cola.Ī couple of decades in, the kombucha category remains a font of bottom-up innovation. Kombucha was the better-for-you beverage that the industry didn’t see coming, a truly grassroots “maker” phenomenon that was turned into a trailblazing beverage option for the health conscious by a man who wanted to help his mother recover from breast cancer.
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