And through it all, we continue to see growth for Just Ice Tea. After Honest Tea’s first ranking 22 years ago (#114), it’s good to be back on Inc. magazine’s 5,000 list of the fastest growing private companies in the United States.
Just Ice Tea’s growth from $1 million in 2021 to $23.8 million make us 88th overall and the fifth fastest growing food and beverage company.
When most people think about fast growth, they usually think about AI or other technology-driven enterprises. While technology has changed a lot since 2003, (I didn’t yet have a mobile phone back then), it’s remarkable to think about how much has and has not changed in the bottled tea world since 2003.
At the garden level in India, China and Africa, almost all of our tea leaves are picked by hand, the same way they have been for thousands of years.
Once the leaves are picked, they are run through the same drying and tumbling systems that have been in use for more than 50 years, and the equipment is often older.
Until the 1950s, all tea gardens were organic because chemical pesticides, herbicides and fertilizers weren’t widely used in the Developing world. Organic tea gardens now represent a small sliver of the global tea supply.
Technology for bottling plants has mostly stayed the same – there are some newer X-ray technologies to detect foreign materials and robots to stack pallets, but otherwise our brewing, filling, and capping processes are identical to the bottling lines of the 1980s.
Sales in stores are still mostly done in person. Our distributors use handhelds for taking orders, but the techies haven’t yet devised an app that does a better job of capturing shelf space than a hard-working sales rep. Though the amount of bottled tea sold online and shipped directly continues to grow, more than 90% of bottled tea is sold in stores and carried home.
But what people are drinking has changed. Soda used to be the biggest drink category. Today water is the largest category, and the market is flooded with seltzers and healthier sodas, not to mention more organic and Fair Trade options. And the packages have evolved too – bottled tea was almost exclusively in glass bottles back in 2003. Now more than 95% of the market is in plastic bottles or cans.
The tactics for brand-building have shifted from public relations to social media. But just as Honest Tea relied on sampling and guerrilla marketing as our primary strategy for recruiting consumers, the focus of Just Ice Tea’s marketing budget is focused on field efforts. Technology can do a lot of things, but even ChatGPT hasn’t figured out a way to hand out a sample cup of cold tea with a smile.
There continue to be great opportunities for investors who bet on improving our food system. Although progress does not always move in a straight line, especially with the frequency of social media driven diets (bacon should not be at the base of anyone’s food pyramid!), the general direction is toward healthier and more transparent foods.
Article by Seth Goldman is Co-Founder of JUST ICE TEA, a line of organic and Fair Trade bottled tea that’s Just Sweet Enough. Seth and his co-Founder, Celebrity Chef Spike Mendelsohn are also co-founders of PLNT Burger, a plant-based quick-serve restaurant that offers delicious burgers, fries, and soft-serve.
Seth is also the Co-founder of Honest Tea and Chair of the board of Beyond Meat. In 2023 he took on a new role as Chair of the Mission Guardians for Tony’s Chocolonely, an international chocolate company committed to creating an exploitation-free supply chain. He has been widely recognized for his entrepreneurial success and impact, including the Washington DC Business Hall of Fame, Partnership for Healthier America’s CEO of the Year, and EARTHDAY.ORG’s Climate Visionary of the year. He is a graduate of Harvard College (1987) and the Yale School of Management (1995). Seth and his Honest Tea co-founder, Barry Nalebuff are the authors of The New York Times bestselling comic book, Mission in a Bottle.