Vinicius and Leonardo Mazurek founded Pod Kombucha in 2019. The brothers, who already led healthy lifestyles, decided to delve deeper and soon realized the drink’s potential to make an impact and transform people’s lives.

Pod Kombucha is located in Itajaí, Santa Catarina, in southern Brazil, midway between São Paulo and Porto Alegre. They have a 100% vertically integrated operation: R&D laboratory, production, quality control, and fulfillment in the same complex, with more than 30 employees.

They were one of the first Brazilian companies to obtain registration with the Ministry of Agriculture (MAPA) and to comply with Brazil’s official Kombucha Identity and Quality Standard (PIQ).

Today, Pod Kombucha ships to all of Brazil, supplying customers via their own e-commerce subscriptions, TikTok Shop, and marketplaces, which today account for 70% of sales. Physical retail is their fastest-growing front, with entry into national chains including Sam’s Club and a network of regional distributors being built.

With over 103,000 Followers on Instagram, they are easily the most popular brand in the country, as measured by social media.

Origins

In 2019, Vinicius was a chemical engineer at BRF, one of the largest food companies in the world, and brewed kombucha at night in his spare time. Leonardo was building a career at Bradesco, Brazil’s largest private bank. Vinicius remembers:

Kombucha came into my life through two women: my mother, always connected to natural food and to the idea that health starts in the gut, and my wife, who at the time was writing her senior thesis on the international kombucha market. With my Chemical Engineering background, I fell in love with the fermentation process and started brewing at home. The turning point was the pandemic. The world stopped, sales to friends kept growing, and we realized this could be much bigger than a hobby. We left everything to build it together.

Production

Pod Kombucha is shelf-stable, meaning it can be shipped without refrigeration.

That was when we stopped being a refrigerated regional brand and became a national one. Logistics stopped being a ceiling and became a competitive advantage.

We work with stainless steel and polypropylene tanks, and today we can ferment 31,000 liters of kombucha simultaneously. Our technical signature is long, natural fermentation: our kombuchas go through an extended process that consumes virtually all of the sugar, and our Super Shot ferments for 4 months before canning.

Turning points

The brothers identify four key decisions.

First: vertical integration from day one, with our own factory and R&D lab, when the industry standard is to outsource. Second: solving shelf stability at room temperature, which unlocked the entire country. Third: building a strong digital channel, with e-commerce, subscriptions, and a community we educated for years. Fourth: expanding the thesis from kombucha to functional beverages. In 2025, we launched Poddi, Brazil’s first prebiotic soda, with 5g of prebiotic fiber and no added sugar, which was born as the biggest launch in our history. The result: revenue doubled from 2024 to 2025, and we are keeping that pace.

Products

Pod Kombucha is sold in both 310ml cans, 400ml bottles, and 750ml champagne-style bottles.

Brazilian ingredients are central to their portfolio. Red Berries in cans and Strawberry & Hibiscus in their traditional line are the best-selling kombuchas. A case of 12 cans lists for R$156 (US$30). The 400ml bottles are only shipped to customers in the Southern region and list for  R$1259 (US%$31) a case.

In their sparkling line, the newest launch is Pitanga & Pimenta (Surinam cherry and chili), combining pitanga, hibiscus, and ginger in a warm profile. Three bottles are sold online for R$198 (US$39).

Poddi is a prebiotic soda with fiber. Flavors include Cherry Ice, Lemon Boost, Orange Citrus, and Grape Cream, plus a limited edition Guaraná (the most Brazilian flavor there is) & Açaí, created for the World Cup season. A case of 12 cans retails online for R$119 (US$23).

50ml ‘Super Shots” are a blend of long-fermented kombucha and seven other ingredients: Lemon, Ginger, Black pepper, Turmeric, Cinnamon, Cardamom, and Green tea. A Weekly Kit: seven Super Shots lists for R$63 (US$12).

They also carry a line of “Smart Drinks” in 269ml cans.

• ENERGY contains 94mg of caffeine and 500mg of taurine in a natural, sugar-free formula. Additionally, the L-Theanine from matcha provides sustained energy without a crash.
• CALM features selected nootropics designed to promote calmness and improve sleep quality. Flavored with passion fruit, chamomile, and lemon balm, it contains the recommended daily intake of magnesium, tryptophan, and ginseng.
• FOCUS is enriched with nootropics, formulated to enhance your focus and mental performance. Ensure sustained concentration and mental clarity for moments of high cognitive demand.

They note that their most popular line is shelf-stable cans:

In 2022 we developed Brazil’s first kombucha with no residual sugar that is shelf-stable at room temperature, in a can. That unlocked our logistics in a country of continental proportions, where the cold chain is the industry’s biggest bottleneck. Bottles still play an important role: our refrigerated traditional line and our 750ml sparkling kombucha, which is the brand’s most viral product.

Observations

Vinicius and Leonardo shared lessons from their experience, their thoughts on the future of kombucha in Brazil, and recommendations for others considering this industry.

Starting a kombucha company in Brazil

First, understand the regulations before buying equipment: registration, a technical officer, and alcohol content control are not details. Second, master the process before the marketing: fermentation is science, and inconsistency kills beverage brands. Third, accept that early on you will spend more educating than selling, so turn education into community. And fourth, treat logistics as a product decision, not a cost: in Brazil, freight defines what is possible.

Among the challenges that newcomers to the industry might not understand is the need to educate the market.

When we started, talking about the microbiome sounded fringe, and every sale required explaining what kombucha was before selling ours. Add to that a specific regulation (MAPA’s IN 41/2019, with a registered technical officer and alcohol content control), a continental country where freight can cost more than the product, and no outside capital: we built everything without investors. Building a kombucha business in Brazil means carrying the entire category on your back while building your own brand.

We spent six years explaining what kombucha is, why fermentation matters, and what the gut has to do with mood, skin, energy, and immunity. In the beginning, that sounded like fringe talk. Today science confirms what we were saying back then, and gut health has become a global movement.

Our advantage is that education became our way of doing marketing: accessible technical content, founders who answer fermentation questions publicly, and a factory we show from the inside. Authority cannot be bought with media; it is built with consistency.

The biggest challenge to operating at scale

Logistics is enemy number one, which is why we attacked refrigeration first: a shelf-stable product changes the math of freight, shelf life, and retail. Then comes consumer education, which raises acquisition costs, and regulation, which requires a technical process for every formula or label change. Our answer was to turn constraint into design: vertical integration to protect margins, long fermentation to guarantee stability, and content to turn the cost of education into a brand asset.

Challenges and opportunities

The opportunity is clear: the seat of Brazil’s big functional beverage brand is still empty, and we intend to take it. Abroad, Poppi was acquired by PepsiCo for nearly US$2 billion, and the global prebiotics market is projected to exceed US$200 billion by 2033. Brazil is already the fourth largest kombucha market in the world, while traditional soda consumption falls year after year.

The challenges: scaling with healthy margins in a country with expensive logistics, and growing fast enough before the giants take the space. When Coca-Cola, Pepsi and Ambev enter the segment, they validate the category we helped create in Brazil. Our edge is speed, in-house science, and a brand the new generation feels is theirs.

Future plans

The number of kombucha producers in Brazil has grown more than 900% in six years, and the country is already among the largest markets in the world. What started as an experiment in our kitchen became a vertically integrated foodtech with three brands: Pod in kombucha, Poddi in prebiotic soda, and Nood, our nootropic beverage line debuting now. The thesis has been the same since day one: using science and fermentation to improve people’s health in an accessible and enjoyable way. And the story is just beginning.

Disclaimer

This profile is based on the contents of the Pod Kombucha website and responses to interview questions we exchanged via email in Portuguese. I relied on Google Translate for the English version of this material.

Uma versão portuguesa da entrevista esta disponível para download.