Italy 2024: “The Year of Kombucha”

Thanks ROY Kombucha head Fabio Carlucci for posting about the cover story on Gambero Rosso, Italy’s leading food and beverage publisher, kicking off 2024 by featuring kombucha on its cover with the headline “The year of kombucha – Are you ready for the invasion of fermented tea?” It states:

The beverage, with its thousand-year-old history and extraordinary taste complexity, is conquering the world. In Australia and the USA, it already occupies entire compartments in supermarkets and is also beginning to overtake Europe, including Italy.

With just 13 Italian brands listed in the Worldwide Directory, there is plenty of room for growth. With a population nearing 60 million, the Instagram stats show that there are only 28,500 Followers of these companies. One of these is Verona’s Legend Kombucha, profiled here in November, whose founder Stefano Zamboni anticipated

…a spike in sales in 2024, which he hopes will be “the summer of kombucha in Italy,” and hopes there will be a similar growth to that seen in Spain.

What’s the potential?

Take a look at the UK, with a population of only seven million more than Italy, 99 brands have attracted 336,630 Followers. Or Spain, with a population just three-quarters of Italy’s where 33 brands attract 284,125 Followers.

When the next 200,000 Italians discover the drink, 2024 will indeed be L’anno della kombucha!