Brew Dr. Kombucha - Elevate Your Tea!
In 2006, Matt Thomas opened a teahouse with a simple mission: to share quality teas. Brewing kombucha in the basement soon turned into something bigger—so popular it had to be bottled. That spark grew into Brew Dr. Kombucha, now a nationally recognized brand. What sets Brew Dr. apart isn’t just flavor, but purpose. As the first major kombucha company to become B Corp Certified and achieve carbon neutral operations, Brew Dr. proves that business can thrive while staying true to its values. In this interview with Delivery Rank, Matt shares his journey from teahouse founder to kombucha pioneer, and how Brew Dr. balances growth with a mission to do good.
Your tea-first approach is central to your kombucha brewing process. Can you elaborate on how this sets Brew Dr. Kombucha apart from other brands in the industry?
Brew Dr. started out as a tea company. I founded the company in 2003 as a single teahouse location in Portland, Oregon. The idea was to create a casual coffee shop vibe, but serving every type of tea beverage we could discover. Chai from scratch, boba, herbal wellness teas, rare teas, classics... we had over 200 teas that we served our guests. It became a place where people could discover everything that was possible in the very wide world of tea. While we had success and were able to grow to nine teahouse locations, it was when we started making kombucha in 2008 that we unlocked a real growth opportunity. Our expertise in crafting delicious tea blends led the way, and we quickly realized that we had the ability to make really great kombucha. So we started bottling it in the basement of our first teahouse, and grew the effort from there. Today we are still all about the tea. Our current brand tagline is 'Elevate Your Tea' and our most recent flavor launch, Iced Tea Lemonade kombucha, takes direct aim at delighting consumers of bottled iced tea. Now we are pushing even further, launching an iced tea line that is not a kombucha. Watch for that later this year and in 2026.
How do you ensure the quality and authenticity of the organic ingredients used in your beverages, and why is this so important to your mission?
To us, if you're not using certified organic ingredients, you shouldn't be making kombucha. The organic certification process is very real and rigorous, and it takes a firm commitment by a food producer to earn the USDA Organic seal. Kombucha is a drink that should give you nothing but goodness, from the gut-health properties resulting from authentic fermentation, to the delicious flavors of thoughtful recipes, to the responsibility of ingredients sourced from organic growers that guarantees you are not consuming GMO ingredients or anything grown with harmful pesticides and fertilizers.
Brew Dr. Kombucha is committed to carbon neutrality. What steps have you taken to achieve this, and how do you plan to maintain or enhance these efforts?
Brew Dr. has achieved Scope 1 and 2 carbon neutrality by finding efficiencies in our operations and our supply chain. We are the only national kombucha brand to be a Certified B Corp. We first got B Corp certified in 2018, and have been on the path of continuous improvement since then. B Corps recertify every 2 years. We recently completed our second recertification and our score has continued to improve. Most recently we made improvements in using suppliers closer to our brewery (which drives down carbon used to bring us our ingredients), we extended our paid parental leave, we improved our healthcare plan, and we improved our ability to monitor our energy usage in order to find opportunities to execute reductions.
To read more about Brew Dr. Kombucha, please visit https://www.brewdrkombucha.com/