Doctors scheduled a bone marrow transplant before additional tests came back.
He recalls the grim time in their lives unfolding like this: Laraine’s initial prognosis was bad, a growing golf-ball-size tumor in her breast. His perspective changed the next year when his mother, Laraine, received a sudden cancer diagnosis. The living cultures of yeast and bacteria suspended in the drink-made when they feed off carbohydrates, usually from the fruit juices often added to flavor kombucha-were particularly unappetizing. I thought it looked weird,” Dave recalls. The Daves were the type of family who vacationed at Indian ashrams, and they’d received a starter lump of bacteria and yeast from a vegan friend, who in turn had gotten it from a Buddhist nun. He was at his family’s Bel Air home, and the tea was one of the first batches made by his parents. The first time Dave tried kombucha, at 13, he nearly spat it out. “If your claim to fame is that you’re in amber bottles, or you’re three cool hipsters behind this product, and that’s it? Your days are numbered, in my opinion.” Dave makes no secret what he considers his company’s greatest asset: “Our saving grace is that at the end of the day this company truly is an extension of me.” Yellow-tinted bottles, which draw even more of his disdain. I think that’s what kills the entrepreneurial spirit.” “A lot of companies our size shy away from risk. make it basic, make it mainstream.” Health-Ade sells its drink in medicinal-looking He turns his ire on fast-growing rival Health-Ade, which now has $50 million in sales. With the sanctimoniousness of a perturbed monk, he decries competitors who have “bastardized” kombucha. These well-funded competitors are eating away at Dave’s first-mover advantage, putting him on his heels and prompting him to fire off defensive potshots. There are more than 350 kombucha makers in the world (most in the U.S.), and they’ve slurped up roughly $340 million in funding from venture capital, private equity and big conglomerates like Coca-Cola and PepsiCo, which paid $260 million for GT’s biggest rival, Kevita, three years ago. 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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