Call it the country’s first Probiotic Delivery Service.
New York City-based BAO Fresh Kombucha has announced plans for a new direct-to-consumer delivery service for their healthy beverage line. BAO (which stands for Bad Ass Organics) will utilize local couriers, UPS overnight service and delivery trucks to provide their fresh, local kombucha to residents and businesses across the tri-state area of New York, New Jersey and Connecticut.
BAO hopes to be able to carve out a niche in the increasingly crowded functional and nutritional beverage space via the unconventional distribution strategy. Modeling off the social media-savvy gourmet food truck movement in Los Angeles, BAO will use their new Facebook page, a web site with an e-store, and other social media resources as a platform to alert customers to local delivery times.
“New technologies make it feasible to execute on business strategies that were previously impossible to consider,” said BAO co-founder Mike Brady. “By using affordable e-commerce and social media tools and partnering with a handful of delivery and courier services, we are able to make BAO available online and reach more customers in our local market than we could have solely through traditional distribution channels.”
BAO, an acronym for Bad Ass Organics, was started a little over a year ago by chef Michael Schwartz. “We started with the idea of how to make healthy soda,” he said. In that short year, they have expanded to 7 flavors (Original, Ginger, Berry, Super Green, Grape, Mango & Spice) in over 70 locations across this tri-state area.
Schwartz developed the delivery service as a way to help those trapped in a “food desert” where “the person spending fourteen hours a day at their desk is drinking too many diet sodas because it is the only option on hand. It is our goal to make nutritious drinks available” for everyone, he said.
Hannah Crum, founder of KombuchaKamp.com, is a contributing writer to BevNET.