History

Wild Grass

Change is always possible

In 2010, we decided to abandon our life in Poland and settle down in Asia, for at least a couple of years. The plan was very simple – we sell an apartment in Warsaw and buy a small hotel in Bali. The plan seemed to have no shortcomings. We’d been in Asia several times – and liked it a lot – Indonesia was politically stable, and Bali had developed as a tourism destination. What more could we have wanted? We found a hotel, we bought tickets and embarked on the deal of a lifetime. Where’s the beverage business in all of this?

It turned out (not for the first time) that dreams are often much more colourful than reality. Most tourists in the area of “our” hotel turned out to be eternally drunk, noisy and the paradise island appeared terribly overloaded with tourism. Apart from that, we’d been forced to buy the property with a mysterious Indonesian partner. After analysing the facts, we decided to find a Plan B very quickly.

We went to the neighbouring island of Celebes, looking for some peaceful quiet land. We had many ideas, but almost all of them were not enough good for various practical reasons – too expensive, too complicated, too difficult, too short-term… After days of continuous discussions, we had eliminated all the ideas except one – becoming tea beverage producers. Of course, we had no simple idea of what it meant to produce beverages, we did not know anything about the food business or trade. We were geographers who felt more in their element walking through swamps than through supermarkets, but since the plan of our property in Asia failed, we could not go back to Poland without a good alternative.

It was 2010. We started a small beverage startup making craft sodas for HoReCa. Since then, we have produced various beverages, become part of Polish food specialty programs, won several awards and prizes – and some positive attention in the press too. Today we work with a number of large companies in Poland and abroad.

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