Q&A with Happy Culture founders - Mark Jones and Manon Colmant
1. As ambassadors for healthy living, you have imbued Happy Culture with a wonderful joie de vivre – what’s the fundamental ethos that underpins the brand?
We are strong believers that a healthy body, is a key ingredient for optimal happiness. People often associate being healthy as something that’s unexciting or inconvenient. Our mission to offer delicious goodness-filled products aimed at uplifting one’s wellbeing in a way that is fun, exciting and accessible. Our greater mission is the elevate the lives of those who enjoy our products’s wonders, inspiring a beautiful evolution for all on an individual and collective level.
2. Expand on Happy Culture’s signature style – delicious aromas, fresh and bubbly…
Different kombucha brands have largely varying styles depending on the ingredients and methods used in production. We have chosen to use 100% green tea base which leads to a style that is fresh, clean and elegant. We pride ourselves for creating brews which are beautiful balanced on the palate and have a low sugar, dry style, with delicate but lively effervescence. Furthermore, we use mineral water and high quality ingredients to ensure our cultures stay healthy and happy, resulting in delicious tasting ferments. All our brews are true to this signature style, which each blend offers a unique expression of flavour and aromatic sensations.
3. How did you come across kombucha? And why did you decide to it market it?
The first time we came across kombucha was at a yoga retreat during a travel Odyssey in Latin America. We immediately fell in love with the weird but wondrous fizzy ferment. About 18 months later when we were back in South Africa, we started exploring the opportunity to start a venture aimed at spreading the kombucha love in the country, and we soon realised that this was an opportunity well aligned with our entrepreneurial spirits, the market trends, and our desire to inspire positive change.
4. What is kombucha, and what is its beneficial properties?
Kombucha is a fizzy probiotic tea, crafted using an ancient Eastern tradition. A sweet tea undergoes a unique fermentation process with combined with a healthy culture of bacterias and yeasts (known as a SCOBY). The result is a naturally fizzy living drink, which is filled with an abundance of goodness to uplift one’s wellbeing. Health beneficial properties include gut-loving probiotics, organic acids, antioxidants, vitamins and digestive enzymes, which together work to : improve digestion and gut flora, boost immunity and vitality, balance and detoxify the body.
5. Describe the Happy Culture taste – “fresh, tangy-sweet cultured tea”? What’s the choice of flavours?
The best way we can describe the taste of our kombucha in a nutshell is ‘somewhere between iced tea and Champagne’. A little yeasty, a little tangy, a little sweet. During the fermentation process, the cultures will consume the sugars to produce a range of organic acids such a acetic, gluconic and glucuronic acids. These acids offer tarty and sour sensations. There are also some flavours from the tea of course, while the yeasts contribute a yeasty element, and the residual sugar a little sweetness to balance it all. Our flavours are: Cucumber & Mint, Blueberry Basil, Ginger Lemon, Rooibos Chai, Pineapple Lime and Raspberry Hibiscus.
6. Do you both come from Cap Classique & Champagne backgrounds – in what capacity? How did you transfer your insights to shaping unique kombucha beverages?
I (Manon) grew up on our family farm in Franschhoek, ‘Colmant Cap Classique & Champagne’, which was founded by my parents and which specialises in the production of a delicious Cap Classique range (the South African name for Champagne). Both Mark and I worked with my dad on the farm for close to a year prior to embarking on this business journey, where we learnt a lot about the art of the perfect bubble, the running of a winery and a beverage business. The expertise, knowledge and passion gained from this background definitely positively contributed to the creation of Happy Culture, and is especially reflected in the style and quality of our booch, our production methods and the way we run our production facility.
7. Do either of you have links to health/holistic activities, or similar fields - or is this venture just an extension of your positive worldview?
We were both already super passionate about health and wellbeing prior, living active, healthy and mostly plant-based lifestyles. This journey has definitely further boosted and inspired our passion and understanding for health, and especially the topic of gut health. We love living wholesome lives and are more than ever passionate to inspire and support other people’s health journeys.
9. Please explain the fermentation method and tradition it’s based on, and how long does it take?
There are two fermentations that take place in the production of kombucha. The first is in an open vessel, where the Mother Culture (SCOBY) will transform the sweet tea into kombucha by converting the sugars into organic acids, digestive enzymes, vitamins and micronutrients - this process takes about 3 weeks. The second fermentation is a few days in the bottle, this when the bubbles will be created by the yeasts. Once the effervescence level is where we want it to be, we then put the bottles in refrigeration and keep them cold until consumption to avoid further fermentation. This alchemy comes from an ancient Eastern Tradition of about 2000 years, when kombucha was known as ‘The Tea of Immortality’.
10. Longevity, health and fitness are cornerstones of contemporary culture - kombucha is a snug fit as a refreshing dietary inclusion?
Yes, kombucha is a great complement and cherry on top to a healthy diet. Kombucha is filled with a whole lot of goodness to help the body thrive and is especially an easy and delicious way to consume probiotics to support the gut’s micro-biome, and therefore overall wellbeing.
11. Your sparkling green tea kombucha’s live cultures offers an accessible way to improve gut flora? Why is gut health so important ?
The gut plays an important role in our overall health and wellbeing. It can help control everything from our digestion, to our mood to brain health and immune function. In short, a healthy gut is key to a healthier, happier life. The health of our gut microbiome is affected by a range of different factors from diet to environment, exercise, medication, stress, and sleep. We must therefore have a holistic and integrative approach when looking to heal and optimise our gut health.
12. What are the benefits of regular intake of probiotics?
The gut microbiome is made up of trillions of microorganisms — both friendly and unfriendly. Maintaining the right balance of friendly bacteria in our gut with probiotics is known to:
- ♥︎ improve digestion and nutrient absorption,
- ♥︎ boost metabolism and immunity and;
- ♥︎ improve brain function and mood.
13. Happy Culture Kombucha’s low sugar content is a bonus for diet-conscious consumers. Was this a natural add-on?
The amount of sugar present in a specific kombucha very much depends on the recipe and methods used in production. With a desire to produce dry-tasting and healthy, low sugar brews, we have ensured that our kombucha always has <4g/ 100ml of residual sugar at the end of its ferment. It is important to note that we only use unrefined brown sugar, and that the residual sugar consists of only broken down sugars in fructose and glucose form, and therefore healthier sugars than normal table sugar.
14. What raw ingredients are used – what cold pressed Juices, what spices and herbs, what botanicals and extracts etc …
Organic green tea, raw brown sugar and a pinch of kalahari desert salt, along with the starter live cultures of course, are the main ingredients for our base kombucha recipe. The various blends then have different ingredients for the infusions, such as cold pressed ginger, cold pressed cucumber, a range of natural teas, extracts, juices and spices.
15. Happy Culture is born out of your ‘Happy Vibrations’ – expand how they’re infused by the radiant effects of Himalayan salt lamps, 432 Hz music and Rose Quartz crystals.
Yes indeed, a whole lot of love and good vibes are present in our products. Our production home is based in the heart of the beautiful Cape Winelands, where we are blessed with fresh mountain air and a peaceful atmosphere, and where we have aimed to create a perfect environment for our cultures to thrive and become what we love to call ‘ Happy Cultures’. Furthermore, salt lamps are scattered around our fermentation room to further purify the space and 432Hz Reiki healing music plays to our cultures 24 hours a day in the hope that our brews will carry this happiness frequency all the way to those who drink them.
16. Cape Town’s natural beauty serves as an inviting backdrop to enjoy a wholesome lifestyle – was this aesthetic part of the motivation of shaping Happy Culture?
Yes, it sure was ! The natural beauty and vibrancy of the Mother City was a great source of inspiration for us. While developing our vision and conceptualising our branding in line with this, Muki- our legendary furry friend- would take us out of the office and into the mountains every day, and it is here, in nature, amongst the beautiful flora and vistas of the Cape, that a lot of our ideas and inspirations were born. The fynbos illustrations on our branding are a reflection of this.
18. Your Happy Culture PET bottles are 100% recyclable – minimising one’s environmental footprint is clearly important to you?
In order to share the Happy Culture love far and wide, packaging is both a wonderful solution and unfortunate necessity. It was not easy for us to chose the type packaging to use. We needed a packaging solution which would enable our vision to make kombucha more accessible to the market, while also holding close to our hearts our desire to minimise our environmental footprint.
There is a lot of misconception on the topic of plastic /packaging. When assessing the environmental impact of packaging, it is key to understand the impact across the product’s entire life cycle, from production to disposal. PET uses significantly less energy across its life cycle than other beverage packaging alternatives, which reduces a variety of environmental impacts. PET is also inexpensive, lightweight, resealable, shatter-resistant and highly recyclable. If recycled, PET is actually a much more environmentally sustainable option than it is often perceived to be, as it becomes a part of a circular economy, while minimising the need for raw materials, energy and staying away from landfills/the natural environment. Check out our website to find out more about PET and how we can work together to minimise our environmental footprint.
Thank You!
Connect with Happy Culture to find out more about how you can improve your lifestyle with a little bottle of happiness every day.
Email: hello@happyculture.co.za
Website: www.happyculture.co.za
Telephone: +27 (0) 83 405 0384
Stockists:
Wellness Warehouse, Pick n Pay, Spar, Food Lover’s Market, Faithful to Nature, Vida e Caffe, Oumeul bakery, Organic Zone + many other coffeeshops, convenience and health stores, farmstalls, delis and restaurants around South Africa.
Price:
340ml bottle : R24.99 – R30.00
850ml bottle : R55.00 – R62.00
