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It’s easy to get caught up in the news and activities of the industry’s global giants, but what about the smaller firms pushing boundaries with bold ideas? In this instalment of Start-up of the Month – which celebrates small businesses and earlier-stage companies' innovations – we speak to Naomi Partridge, co-founder of Holos Kombucha, a handcrafted kombucha brand centred around campaigning for social change.
Can you tell us a bit about Holos Kombucha, its journey and the mission behind the company?
Holos is Brewed For Good – we brew authentic, award-winning and gut-friendly drinks whilst supporting survivors of exploitation and trauma through paid work placements and grants via our charity, The Holos Foundation.
Our journey started with a life-changing moment in Cambodia, where co-founder Megan and I met whilst volunteering with women being exploited on the streets of Phnom Penh, and we saw the power of employment in helping them find freedom, for good. We decided to start Holos to create these kinds of safe, supportive work opportunities for the 120,000 people in exploitation in the UK. Kombucha became our social impact vehicle, and alongside our co-founders and husbands Tom and Joseph, our journey officially began in 2018. We brew our organic drinks in West Sussex, and are now stocked in Waitrose, Whole Foods, Selfridges, Ocado, Amazon, healthy wholesalers, independents and beyond.
How did you navigate building a brand within the competitive functional beverages space?
We are still learning how best to navigate this highly competitive and quickly evolving space. There is a real nuance to the balance of staying true to what makes you unique as a brand, including your founder story, your product and positioning, whilst responding to emerging consumer trends and the competitor landscape.
Our big wrestle has always been about how we manage our messaging hierarchy – between our social impact and our product. We believe we’ve landed on the right direction with something far more focused on the theme of GOOD – both feeling good and doing good. A shout-out to Brand Growth Heroes Mini MBA, Fi Fitzpatrick and all sponsors for the transformative coaching support that helped us get to this point.
How do you balance health benefits with flavour and taste when building a kombucha brand?
From the start, we’ve been absolutely obsessed with taste – especially driven by our MD Tom, who, when he first tasted another kombucha back in 2016, thought it tasted like cheese water and wanted to create a drink people would choose on its own merit, not just as a gut health option. Our belief is that when you brew kombucha the authentic, traditional way, you don’t have to make the choice between taste and gut health. Fermentation, when done right, creates an incredible complexity of taste – and we’ve found a fantastic combination of flavour pairings that unlocks it. Our repeat purchase rate reflects this, alongside our wide range of taste awards, including the UK Soft Drinks 2026 award for Best New Concept Drink for our Mulled Spice chilled kombucha.
What role has sustainability and social responsibility played within Holos Kombucha's story?
We simply wouldn’t exist without our social mission – that came first, and kombucha was our vehicle of choice to make the impact we wanted. We are purpose architects. Equally, every choice we make – from being organic to our supply chain, our packaging and even to the quality of our product, has impact and sustainability in mind. We believe it’s just the way business should be done, and find the new wave of brands and businesses with purpose and sustainability embedded as a really exciting development – and a return to the original call of business to serve the people and planet, not the other way around.
What has been the company's biggest achievement to date?
Gaining a Waitrose listing that then grew seven times its size in just ten weeks was a huge achievement. They backed not only the quality of our product, understanding the nuances of the functional drinks space and where premium, authentic kombucha plays – but also our social mission, and through them we have now funded (at the time of writing) four grants for survivors of exploitation to help rebuild their lives through therapeutic interventions… and we’re just getting started.
Can you tell us about any notable challenges on your journey so far and how you navigated them?
So many challenges! At a personal level, two co-founding couples – and we’ve had six kids between us in the last eight years. That’s a lot to navigate whilst building a challenger brand that also manufactures in-house, requiring a relentless focus on quality production.
Navigating Covid – we lost our brewer to return to New Zealand overnight, and the subsequent shutdown of the hospitality and on-trade. Winning and losing listings. Cash flow during challenging economic times. And all throughout whilst maintaining a commitment to our social mission and ensuring we continue to provide jobs for survivors.
What do you think is the functional beverage category's next big trend?
From a kombucha point of view, if the US and Australia markets show us anything, they tell us that a maturing of the market will come – mindful consumers are becoming more discerning in terms of 'health-washing,' ultra-processed foods and what is genuine kombucha, and are seeking simpler, cleaner solutions. In a more mature market, authentic brewing matters.
The 'no and low' alcohol growth will continue and there is more space for craft functional drinks to play in that occasion, too.
What's next for Holos Kombucha? Any exciting plans you can share with us?
We remain committed to driving forward our chilled range – but we also know that our consumers drink us not only for gut health, but also as an alcohol alternative. This is an area that we are exploring further as we look forward. We’re also going to be moving towards a more playful approach as a brand, because consumers need those moments of feeling good when they drink Holos, not just doing good to their bodies.
What advice would you give to other start-ups in the food and beverage industry?
Firstly, don’t skimp on quality. A winning product has to be something that people will buy more than once, and taste is your passport to that.
Immerse yourself quickly in the industry to get expert opinions – and find people who will give you brutal, honest feedback. Test and learn fast; don’t wait for perfection before you launch into the world – test quickly, direct to consumer.
Check the market to find something that will actually expand the category rather than just compete with what’s already out there; this will make life a lot easier to get those initial conversations. Make sure you have the emotional bandwidth and ‘village’ in your lives to sustain the ups and downs of challenger brand life… especially if you are building other things at once, such as families and caregiving. Overestimate what it will take to do this – not just funding, but time, energy, etc. It’s rewarding, AND it’s a huge, risky commitment.
Collaborate and find your people – not just consumers and stockists, but other brands – together we go further. And finally, don’t wait until you are ‘big enough’ to map impact into your business. Find that purpose up front, see what you can uniquely bring to the world with the platform you have; it’s a privilege – why not use it for real good?
