BevNET is delighted to announce that GT Dave, the founder of GT’s Kombucha, will join BevNET Live on Monday, Dec. 8. GT will be on hand to provide insights for entrepreneurs derived from his own 20-year journey building the kombucha category.
The founder of the country’s best-selling and best-known kombucha brand, GT has, since launching in 1995, maintained a close relationship with his consumers, whose passion for the product is unequalled throughout the beverage industry, while stoking patient growth that has become a passionate movement. In gradually graduating from home-brewed, hand-delivered bottles to large high-volume displays in both natural and conventional retailers, the company has remained fiercely independent and focused on GT’s committed mission: to provide consumers with products that improve people’s health and to awaken their awareness to the power behind a healthy lifestyle.
GT will take part in the event with a discussion of the brand’s early years, the challenges entrepreneurs face from the outset, and as they grow, and the ways he has been able to maintain his consumer connections while increasing sales, broadening the company’s retail footprint, and his company’s ability to react in the face of a larger set of healthy, natural, functional drinks. Now 20 years on, GT will be looking back with the eye of an experienced, but still ambitious brand-builder, one whose thoughts on strategy and passion will be of great value to the audience of beverage entrepreneurs at BevNET Live.
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About GT Dave
GT is the founder and owner of GT’s Kombucha. GT started his company in 1995 at the age of 15 following his mother, Laraine’s cancer diagnosis. It was thought that the usage of ‘cultured’ tea was a beverage that helped her to cope with the physical and emotional challenges of the disease as a spiritual elixir of inspiration for a prompt recovery. GT was inspired to begin making kombucha from the kitchen of his parents’ house to share with family and friends.
After 20 years, GT’s Kombucha has grown from its humble beginnings, when GT would hand-deliver his just-bottled Kombucha to local health food stores, to a full-fledged company that makes more than 20 different varieties of Kombucha products distributed throughout all of the U.S and some parts of Canada. Although the company has experienced some incredible growth, GT remains committed to expanding the company gradually and organically, based on the same foundation that inspired him when all started; quality inspired by nature, health and spirituality.
GT brews and bottles his Kombucha in his hometown of Los Angeles in a facility not far from his childhood home, where he brewed his first batches of Kombucha. His mom, Laraine, still resides in the same house, and she continues to be GT’s inspiration and muse.