His $3 to $4 bottles can be found at retailers like Walmart, Costco and Kroger. He was the first to put kombucha on store shelves, in the late 1990s, and GT’s is still the biggest manufacturer, owning 40% of the U.S. “I can’t point to a single other beverage entrepreneur who has done that.”Ī less sure-minded person in Dave’s position might be waffling on his convictions right now, for his kingdom is increasingly under siege. Dave has “the freedom to still be 100% himself,” Steltenpohl says. He long ago left Odwalla and has a new nut-milk startup, Califia Farms. Steltenpohl knows what it’s like to give up independence, chafing at the chains wrapped around him by public shareholders after Odwalla’s 1993 IPO. “He has been able to scale his company while retaining his craft ethos and independent spirit,” says Greg Steltenpohl, an admirer of Dave’s and a founder of the Odwalla juice company. “This is what the customer wants,” he insists. And Dave does not skim away the mix of yeast and bacteria that does the fermenting, leaving small amounts floating gelatinously in the drink. It is not pasteurized, though doing so would make the beverage less perishable and easier to ship. Unlike many of his rivals, he says, he makes his authentically, and it’ll stay like that: “From day one, I tried to emulate a homemade process.” Dave lets nature do much of the work, as he has since the beginning: fermenting a blend of black and green teas in small batches of 5-gallon jars for a month. This new, 260,000-square-foot factory doesn’t mean he’s changing how his kombucha is made. Ethan Pines for Forbesĭave, 41, takes the opportunity to make a point, one very important to him and his GT’s Living Foods, a business with an estimated $275 million in sales. His greater challenge: surviving the rush of competitors flooding a market he once had all to himself.
George Thomas Dave convinced America to love a tangy, tart, fermented beverage from Asia called kombucha-and it made him a billionaire.
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