San Diego-headquartered JuneShine is adding another product line to its expanding portfolio, but the latest addition is outside of the beverage-alcohol realm.
JuneShine non-alcoholic (NA) kombucha joins a portfolio that includes its hard kombucha and canned cocktail lines, light lager brand Easy Rider and acquired flavored malt beverage-maker (FMB) Flying Embers.
JuneShine co-founder Forrest Dein told Brewbound that an NA version of its kombucha has been its “most-requested product over the last six years.” The success and popularity of alternative prebiotic sodas such as Olipop and Poppi caught the attention of Dein and JuneShine co-founder and CEO Greg Serrao.
“We said, what if we take everything that people love about those, the prebiotic plant fiber, combine it with traditional, raw, organic kombucha with a billion live probiotics, and put it into one package where you’re getting what we’re calling symbiotic pre plus pro,” Dein said. “We think it’s innovative. It still tastes like delicious kombucha but gives you even more benefit.”
The NA kombucha is already showing up in Erewhon stores in Los Angeles and will roll into additional stores across Southern California in early September.
The line will expand to around 300 Whole Foods Market locations across the country, starting in December, including several parts of the country that have yet to see JuneShine products. Additional large chain grocery retailers are expected to follow in spring 2025.
The product will roll out in five flavors – Mango, Passion Orange Guava, Raspberry Ginger Lemon, Ginger Lemon, and Honeycrisp Apple – that will be sold in 16 oz. clear bottles at a price point between $3.99 and $4.29, priced in-line with market leaders GT’s and Health-Ade. Dein said the clear bottles offer a “clear differentiator” from JuneShine’s hard kombucha products.
The addition of the non-alcoholic kombucha line follows the hiring of long-time Boston Beer sales veteran Whitney Stevenson as president and CCO.
“It’s important for us that she wasn’t just someone from a big company that didn’t really understand JuneShine, but she’s watched it grow over the last five years. She’s a customer herself, and really fits her culture and wants to build the next Boston Beer in the Southwest.”
Unlocking the existing JuneShine Hard Kombucha drinker will be a key to the NA brand succeeding.
“We think we can drive a ton of velocity and demand just through our existing customer base,” he added.
Dein believes those existing JuneShine consumers can be activated through social media marketing (the brand boasts 177,000 Instagram followers and a “massive email list across the country”) the company’s ambassador network and sampling at events such as yoga festivals and wellness events.
“Eighty-five percent of JuneShine Hard Kombucha drinkers drink a non-alc booch regularly,” Dein said. “A lot of them weekly. Some of them monthly. But a lot of people are drinking at least once a week, and the super customers are drinking this almost every day as part of their daily routine.
“We already over-indexed, and then only 15% of the U.S. population drinks kombucha, whereas 85% of our customers drink kombucha. So we’re very well set up to reach this audience already.”
The opportunity is one that JuneShine believes could one day become “bigger than our hard kombucha,” Dein said.
“Our goal with innovation is not to launch anything that we don’t think can one day be bigger than our core business,” he said. “The non-alc category is almost 10x the hard kombucha category, so we feel like even with a small share, we could double the business.”
JuneShine has also tapped Ryan Bray as director of sales for NA brands to help it navigate the space. Bray brings experience selling NA brands, such as Sol-Ti, Brew Dr. Kombucha and Stumptown Coffee Roasters, as well as nearly a decade at Craft Brew Alliance and Straub Distributing three years before the craft rollup was fully acquired by Anheuser-Busch InBev.
JuneShine is taking a “hybrid network” to distribution of the NA product, working with HiTouch Distribution in San Diego, Seacoast Distributing in San Diego and Los Angeles, United Natural Foods (UNFI) for national distribution with Whole Foods and KeHe for distribution when the brand launches in Sprouts stores, Dein said. The company will also go direct to Costco and Ralphs in the future.
“We’re prioritizing the best distributor option for each class of trade in each market,” Dein said. “There’s some places where we probably will end up with our beer network, they still have cold chain trucks and already sell NA cold chain into stores, but not everywhere. Our beer wholesalers weren’t set up to do that everywhere. This product needs to stay cold.”
The route to market for NA beverages differs from bev-alc, with NA producers allowed to pay slotting fees for product placements. Dein views this as an opportunity for cooler placements and in-store demos.
“I see it as super high ROI marketing initiatives that we’re able to partner the retailer, get distribution and invest in the store and track that directly to sales, whereas a lot of the time when working on a campaign video or an influencer event and trying to tie that to rate of sale at Erewhon,” Dein said. “Where here I can say we spent this much working from Erehwhon and we’re getting new sales.”
NA kombucha is JuneShine’s first foray into NA beverages, with a product that the company says is the first NA kombucha to feature both prebiotics and probiotics in one bottle. The product is USDA-certified organic, vegan, gluten-free and non-GMO. It’s brewed with Teatulia tea and small-batch fermented with an heirloom SCOBY (symbiotic culture of bacteria and yeast) and co-packed at Rocky Mountain Cultures in Gypsum, Colorado.
“They’re able to scale it and in a facility that’s far away from contaminating our other products,” Dein said.
Dein touched on each of JuneShine’s portfolio focus areas as the company heads into ABP season.
For Flying Embers, which JuneShine acquired in March, the focus is on its FMBs, which were rebuilt “from the ground up” to give them “more sweetness and flavor without a lot of sugar,” Dein said.
Flying Embers’ 19.2 oz. single-serve offerings give JuneShine its first convenience play, he added.
For Easy Rider, the light lager brand that officially rolled out in early 2024, the focus is on growing as a local San Diego brand.
For JuneShineShine Hard Kombucha, it’s working on package, product and price architecture and launching the NA line.
All of this is building on JuneShine’s overall goal of achieving profitability and growing in 2024, Dein said.
“We’ve had months in a row of profitability and big year-over-year growth through that acquisition,” he said. “So that was goal No. 1 and we hit that so that’s been great.”