We recently connected with Joe Carmichael and have shared our conversation below.
Joe, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. We’d love to hear about a time you helped a customer really get an amazing result through their work with you.
One of the biggest success stories we see time and time again, is with restaurants. For the first time in alcohol, we’re bringing to the table a ready-to-drink, cocktail-like option that is both great tasting, clean, and functional. A restaurant has limited tap and menu space, and the brand of IPA or alike often doesn’t impact their number of pints sold or overall sales numbers. With Local Roots, however, not only is it bringing a functional and organic offering, but it’s also low calorie/carb and inherently, less filling. For a restaurant, this can lead to additional, incremental sales. Keeping the calories consumed consistent, more food and drinks can be consumed, and thus better overall restaurant success.
Joe, love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations?
Cousins Ryan White & Joe Carmichael, who shared a passion for health and wellness, each had a personal situation which caused them to revisit their lifestyle and relationship with food & beverages. They brewed the business out of a love for clean eating and cold pressed juicing after family health battles with cancer and gut health. First launched in 2019, the cousins first took time to understand the process of commercial brewing and canning, now Local Roots can now be found in stores throughout California and Arizona. Local Roots is dedicated to give back to local communities while having a positive impact on our planet. They donate regularly to both local and environmental non-profits; the brewery is also solar powered and uses transparent and sustainable ingredients.
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Being cousins, our families have always been our heroes. It may sound funny to talk about health when brewing alcohol, but the entire Local Roots journey actually started for health reasons. Ryan and I both come from active families, and gut health and cancer journeys sparked an urgency to change the way we look at everything we consume for our family. We reinvented our diets and found there weren’t many options when it came to the fun, weekend cocktail hour with family. Local Roots was our answer. People will continue to drink, if we can bring something clean, less indulgent, with some gut-friendly elements as well, then why not?!
Okay – so how did you figure out the manufacturing part? Did you have prior experience?
Learning our craft has been quite the journey. Kombucha is still new to the majority of people. Unlike beer, there aren’t endless YouTube videos on how to make hard kombucha, and certainly weren’t ANY when we started. Luckily, there was some literature on traditional kombucha, which has actually been around for 2,000 years. Traced back to 221 B.C, the culture of bacteria and yeast found in kombucha is what makes kombucha special from most things we consume today. We had great resources for create traditional kombucha, while successfully making it higher alcohol just took tinkering. Using our friends and family as our resident taste-testers, we played around with recipes, ingredients, and methods to get the foundation of flavors we have today. We haven’t stopped there though – we continue to improve our recipes and have a strong R&D team to drive ever-evolving innovating. We have some fun new things up our sleeves here soon, so stay tuned.
Contact Info:
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/LocalRootsKombucha
- Twitter: N/A
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jph_gKBkQvQ
- Yelp: https://www.yelp.com/biz/local-roots-kombucha-vista-2?osq=local+roots+hard+kombucha
- Other: https://www.instagram.com/localrootskombucha/
Image Credits
Kyle Cannon