Soon the teenager started receiving orders from people in high places. "That's how the market slowly grew," he says. They would try the product and spread the word to anyone who would listen "because they genuinely were excited by it," he says. He charged stores roughly $3.75 per bottle and it retailed for about $4.99.įrom there it was some "very, very passionate" consumers who helped Dave's kombucha got off the ground. Soon Dave was selling kombucha to a handful of health food stores around the city, where it typically sat on the shelf next to juice or teas like Snapple. In 1995, Los Angeles' Erewhon Natural Foods (a small independent grocery store that now has five locations and is known for pricey food and celeb-spotting) became Dave's first order, buying two cases (24 16-ounce bottles) of GT's Kombucha. He also gave his son free legal advice and "taught me how to manage my books," Dave says. Photo courtesyĪs a lawyer, Dave's dad sometimes tagged along on sales pitches so stores would not dismiss the teen entrepreneur out of hand. Laraine Dave, GT's mother, poses with an early version of the GT's Kombucha bottle label in the mid-1990s. Within a year, Dave was bottling his home-brewed kombucha with the intention of introducing more people to the drink that he felt was "something that the world needs," he says. Whatever the case, Dave was intrigued enough to start drinking kombucha, but he felt his father's recipe over-fermented the drink, making it a little too vinegary. Scientists note that there is little to no evidence that kombucha could help fight various cancers, and some experts advise that people with compromised immune systems should avoid the drink.) (The story of Laraine's survival was once on the company's kombucha labels, but it was removed after a series of 2010 class action lawsuits alleging deceptive claims about the beverage's health benefits. "I became curious and certainly motivated to understand what this bizarre tea was - because in my mind, it didn't cure my mom and I've never said it cured her, but it certainly helped her," he tells CNBC Make It. When the doctors asked if she had been consuming anything out of the ordinary, Dave says his mother told them about kombucha. According to GT's Living Foods lore, Laraine Dave's doctors were surprised to find that her cancer had not spread, putting her on the path to a full recovery. Then Dave's opinion about kombucha "completely shifted" in 1994 after his mother was diagnosed with an aggressive form of breast cancer. "They were just kind of enamored with how it made them feel," he says. (While there is little or no scientific research to prove that kombucha can boost drinkers' energy, kombucha that is rich in probiotics can benefit your digestive system, according to the Cleveland Clinic.) But Dave's parents' brewed batch after batch, convinced it improved their energy, sleep and digestive health. Laraine and Michael soon started brewing their own kombucha, a process that involves a combination of tea (green, black or both), plus sugar and the Scoby culture, which brewers often recycle from batch to batch - in some cases using the same Scoby for years.Īt first, Dave found the drink too vinegary and tart for his teenaged tastes. It's a gelatinous blob that resembles the top of a mushroom, forms when bacteria and yeast are fermented and serves as the key ingredient in any batch of kombucha.) (A Scoby is "a colony of bacteria," according to Dave. His parents, Laraine and Michael Dave, were introduced to kombucha by friends who gave them a Scoby acquired on a trip to the Himalayas. all that stuff as part of my everyday diet" even back then, Dave says. They were also dedicated health nuts with a penchant for introducing their children to new age foods. Magnin) were heavily influenced by Eastern philosophies and spirituality, with the family even taking spiritual vacations to Indian ashrams. Growing up in the wealthy Bel Air neighborhood of Los Angeles, Dave's dad (a lawyer) and mom (who worked at department store I. Kombucha is a fermented, carbonated drink with living micro-organisms that dates back more than 2,000 years in Eastern Asia and has been long associated with a variety of health benefits ( some more dubious than others).īut "the word 'kombucha' didn't really exist" in Americans' vocabulary when Dave first started his home-brewing operation 25 years ago, he tells CNBC Make It.
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