Edible Vancouver Island Fall 2022

L O C A L L I B A T I O N S

How the fermented tea beverage has captured the imagination and the market Come One, Kombucha

WORDS JOANNE SASVARI PHOTOS DANIKA MCDOWELL

I t used to be that a young mom looking to make a little extra money might consider selling Avon or Tupper ware®. But now there’s a new homegrown business model. “A lot of kombucha makers all have the same story,” says Lea Weir, founder of Salt Spring Island Kombucha. She laughs. “My husband says it’s a lot of housewives making kombucha at home and thinking it was the best kombucha ever.” Nine years ago, Weir was herself a young mother who started selling mason jars of homemade kombucha at the local farm ers’ market. “I really felt that the combination of avours I’d discovered was so good that I could not resist,” she says. And it’s how both Kelsey Hendricks of To no Kombucha and Christine Susut of Victoria’s Cultured Kombucha got into the business, too. “I started drinking it and really enjoyed it, then I started making it myself and really got into it,” says Hendricks. In 2016, she was on maternity leave and started researching business plans; a year later, she launched To no Kombucha. “Before you knew it, I just did it.” Susut was looking for a non-alcoholic alternative to cranberry soda while she was pregnant. Kombucha, she found,

BREWI NG SUCCESS Kombucha has been made for some 2,000 years, and most likely originated in China, where it has long been enjoyed for its re puted health bene ts. But over the last decade, it has exploded in popularity. According to the trade group Kombucha Brewers International, the category went from being worth about $1 million US in sales worldwide in 2014 to $1.84 billion US only ve years later. It continues to grow at about 30% a year with the global market projected to top $10 billion US by 2027, according to Fortune Business Insights. Clearly, kombucha isn’t just some sweet, zzy, non-alcoholic soda pop. “It’s tea, but it’s just like sourdough,” explains Hendricks. Just as sourdough bread is simply our, water, salt and natural yeasts, kombucha is a fermented beverage of green or black tea, sugar and a symbiotic culture of bacteria and yeast (SCOBY), some times with avours and carbonation added. “And that’s it.” Adds Susut: “I always tell people, ‘Are you familiar with yogurt and are you familiar with sourdough?’ It’s similar because it uses the wild yeast that is in the environment. It just loves all the materials that are in tea.” Because of those naturally occurring yeasts, Susut says, “ e kombucha made in your house will be di f ferent from the kombucha made anywhere else. I still nd it magical. It’s so cool.”

was like a classy cocktail that also seemed to help her myriad health problems. “I was a stay-at-home mom and I had a really good sleeper,” she recalls. “He would nap and I would write my busi ness plan and develop my avours and do my market research.” In 2015, she launched Cultured Kombucha. A fermented tea beverage, you might think, is a nice hobby that would appeal to a small, niche market. You might want to think again.

HERBS , FRU I T, FLOWERS “Un avoured and uncarbonated, kombucha tastes just like apple cider,” says Hendricks. e natu ral acids that occur in kombucha add a light citrusy avour to the sweetened tea, resulting in a well balanced drink that is neither too sweet, too sour nor too bitter.

34 FALL 2022 EDIBLE VANCOUVER ISLAND