Organic Processing Vo1.8 #4 - July/August 2011

bling each year for at least the past four years and are now worth more than $150 million annually at retail, according to Beverage Business Insights. Recently, the television news program Dateline stated that more than 3 million people regularly drink kombucha.

Last July, however, commercialized kombucha companies faced a huge challenge when all brands were pulled off shelves and forced to reformulate or regulate due to traces of alcohol found in one brand. GT’s Kombucha was the only brand to do both, but it has not been easy. Through it all, fans have continued to praise this beverage for its sparkling taste and reputed health benefits.

By the second year, he had five accounts and was making about 100–200 bottles a day. Then he got a call from Whole Foods, which was still Mrs. Gooch’s in the late 1990s. Although he hadn’t even tried to approach the growing natural foods chain yet, numerous people had come into their stores with his GT’s Kombucha bottles asking the stores to carry it.

Selling a Concept, Not Just a Product

The buyer wanted to bring GT’s Kombucha into all their stores in the Pacific region—but GT still had to sell the idea individually to each of the Whole

Cluck.

A Homegrown Success

Dave started hand-brewing, bottling, delivering and selling his kombucha in 1995 at a local health foods store in California called Erewhon. “Throughout the years that my parents had been drinking kombucha, they would tell everyone about it, and these people would try to grow it and it just would not turn out right. I knew that as special as kombucha was, it was not going to make it into the hands of everyday people if they had to make it on their own.”

GT’s Kombucha began with a “baby” culture from the “mother” culture his parents had been nurturing for years. As his kombucha babies grew into mothers and had their own babies, GT’s Kombucha gradually trickled into more health food stores in California. He admits his “perception of his products is a lot like a father to his children” and says that he never forced his product into the market and simply “wanted to make sure that they were always in a good place at the right store.”

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