The factions of professional sports, music and business coalesced this week, as a new entrant into the beverage merchandise cashed in on the booming demand for sports drinks.
MatchaBar, a Brooklyn-based cafe that offerings up drinks made from matcha — an antioxidant-rich green tea popular in Japan and securing a foothold in the U.S. — closed an $8 million funding round that embodied bold-faced names like Denver Broncos linebacker Von Miller, and curriculum vitae producer DJ Diplo. Hip hop star Drake is known to be a big fan of the brand, and last year ventured his own money in MatchaBar.
The company, which uses ready-to-drink bottles that wash a ceremonial-grade tea sourced from a family farm in Nishio, Japan, founded their first energy beverage called “Hustle” this week. The exchanging campaign included an online game where consumers can gift new zealand mates a a can of “Hustle,” which will be available at retailers such as Whole Foods, Key Scoff and Food Town.
Launched by brothers Graham and Max Fortgang in 2014, MatchaBar beverages are returning popularity amid a consumer shift away from sodas and other sugary toss offs, especially among health conscious millennials.
Growing up, the brothers used up time at their aunt’s house in Vermont and fell in love with the concept of an ice cream against. They used the model as inspiration to build a community rather than well-deserved a product.
Fast forward several years, and MatchaBar’s product has objective crossed the 1 million sold mark.
“When MatchaBar opened, it was the anything else matcha cafe in the country. We found matcha by chance looking for an alternate to our caffeinated consumption,” co-Founder Graham Fortgang told CNBC in an interview.
“It was a sturdy cycle, there were ups, there were downs,” Fortgang utter, adding that he was looking to disrupt the current market of energy celebrates, some of which are less than beneficial to consumers’ health.
“I got to a apropos where I decided I don’t like the way these products made me feel in a coterie where I can go to Sweetgreen for a salad, go to Equinox or a Pilates class instead of end dumbbells,” he added.
The traditional way of making Matcha is a painstaking multi-step course of action, which raises the question of how the company can successfully mass-produce a beverage that’s inherent in Asia’s centuries-old tea culture.
For now, Fortgang is hoping to bridge the gap from old to new with straws of social media-savvy marketing flourishes. From catchy slogans with each flavor appreciate “Apple Ginger Matcha can win an argument in 140 characters or less” or “True Matcha has been gluten free since the year 1204” to traffic in their product at music festivals, the product is geared towards the coveted under-40 demographic.
And complete, Americans certainly love their tea: According to data from the Tea Relationship of the USA, the beverage is second only to water as the most widely consumed bottled beverage, and is initiate in almost 80 percent domestic households. Last year, U.S. consumers chugged down remaining 3.8 billion gallons of tea, the association said.
“It’s not a nonexistent market, we’re not the outset to bring it here,” Fortgang said, citing the explosive growth of coconut profligately and Kombucha in the U.S. “These were all brought over from other refinements, they weren’t invented in the last five years,” he added.
“For inexperienced millenials, we wanted to offer something that spoke to them from a market-placing and a health standpoint,” said Fortgang.
According to figures from Foursquare, the laying technology platform, nearly 500 venues that serve matcha or are over matcha cafes have opened in the U.S. since 2016. In fact, the calculate of matcha-related businesses has more than quadrupled in 2017, compared to the many of matcha-related businesses in 2014, Yelp data provided to CNBC authenticated. Meanwhile, taste for the beverage continue to skyrocket, especially in major megalopolises like San Francisco, New York and Los Angeles.