Blog Review: Health-Ade Kombucha, Los Angeles, CA

Health-Ade is one of the largest, fastest-growing kombucha companies on the planet. It started back in 2012 when Daina Trout, her husband Justin, and best friend Vanessa Dew sold their home-brew at a local farmers’ market.

These numbers give a sense of their size today:

  • 120,000 bottles brewed daily
  • 65,000 pounds of ginger juiced monthly
  • Over a million Scobys have been raised
  • Over 60,000 2.5 gallon jars are currently fermenting

The brand is available in over 20,000 retail locations nationwide. Health-Ade’s growing roster of 13 flavors are certified organic, Non-GMO, vegan, gluten-free, vegan, and raw, and always free of anything engineered. For more on the origins and growth of the company check out our report from April 2019 on the podcast interview with Daina .

Stats

Blogging since: September 23, 2016
Last Updated: July 1, 2019
Posting Frequency: 5-6 times a month
Post Length: 150-600 words
Aesthetic Appeal: Professionally produced shopify blog, well integrated with the rest of their website and social media presence.
Graphics: Attractive, often product-centric, pictures accompany posts.
Categories: Recipes: Cocktails, Mocktails, Other. Guides: Health & Wellness, How To & DIY, City Guides, Social Cause, Real Food, Kombucha 101. Friends of Health-Ade: Health Enthusiasts, Athletes, Real Foodies, Creatives, Entrepreneurs.
Comments allowed: On approval (but none responded to!)
Alexa.com global traffic ranking: 485,307
Social Media: They have 135,000 followers on Instagram where they’ve posted 2.052 pictures. 6,689 follow them on Twitter where there’s 6,225 tweets. They have 18,133 followers on Facebook. Their 36 videos on YouTube have been viewed over 4 million times.

Blog topics

The Health-Ade blog covers a wide range of topics, as shown by the categories listed above.

How-to and DIY

The ‘How-to and DIY’ category is not, as I first suspected, a guide to brewing your own ‘booch. Rather, it offers homespun advice on issues such as 3 Ways to Enjoy Summer with a Full Time Job which suggests spending some quality time in a hammock with a “good book, a bottle of my favorite summer kombucha, Jalapeno-Kiwi-Cucumber, and the sound of tall grass blowing in the wind.” Another DIY post details 4 Ways To Deal With The Unexpected, which concludes by recommending that we “focus on the things you enjoy and put some effort into being internally balanced, such as drinking Health-Ade kombucha.”

Kombucha 101

This category includes a stellar post on What is Kombucha Fermentation? which is worth looking at, if only for the picture of some of the tens of thousands of 2.5 gallon glass jars Health-Ade is brewed in. The post makes an important point about why fermented foods like kombucha are important:

Those of us who live in urban areas have minimal exposure to bacteria – much less than we did during agricultural times when we were constantly interacting with soil and animals. This reduced exposure is due to many things: the use of chemicals and antibacterial products, less interaction with nature, the sterile nature of our modern food system and more. While these shifts have reduced the spread of harmful pathogens and disease in some contexts, they’ve also removed the helpful microorganisms from our diets and lives and left us with an environment that’s more sterile than we need. This in turn breeds other types of health problems.

One of the best ways to get more beneficial bugs into your life and body is by eating fermented foods. Not only can they boost the nutritional benefit you get from food and aid with digestion, they will also increase the variety of bugs that live in your gut and constantly work on your behalf.

Friends of Health-Ade

The friends listed are social media influencers such as Nicholas Coolridge, aka the Modern Tarzan, pro snowborder Elena Hight, chef Brooke Williamson, and creative leader Andreys Varela.

Recipes

One of the largest categories are the recipes for cocktail (alcoholic) and mocktail (non-alcoholic) drinks. The boozers have a choice of 18 drinks, while teetotalers can choose from 13 libations.

These are not run-of-the-mill drinks. Try the Rhubarb Mimosa Mocktail Kombucha or a Blood Orange-Carrot-Ginger Cocktail.

Suggestions

For a company of this size, it would be fascinating to read customer testimonials and stories on their blog.  The company is getting a lot of press, so it would also be interesting to see news about the Forbes interview with Daina, the Inc piece on the founders, as well as company profiles such as the recent Business Insider story. These would be of much more interest than a summer travel guide to London and Rome which is completely unrelated to kombucha.

By not responding to comments (such as those at the end of this post that asks extensive questions about the product) they seem to be ignoring their customers, which I’m sure is far from the case.

Overall, the Health-Ade blog is a fun and enjoyable read that gives customers a real sense of what this company represents.

 

 

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1 Response

  1. the_editor says:

    Read more about Health-Ade in this KBI member profile.

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