Meet Our Makers: Avit Bhindi of JIVA

Avit Bhindi is the founder of the delicious and health-giving JIVA Products, a handcrafted wellness beverage brand aiming to bring great-tasting, premium beverages to all who seek the best out of life.

Beginning in a ten square metre facility with Avit fermenting kombucha, pressing juice, filling bottles and delivering them on his own, JIVA has grown into a fully fledged, multifaceted wellness beverage brand. With a philosophy that ‘wellness is first and foremost about how you feel’, JIVA use the highest quality, all natural ingredients. They create a range of products including kombucha, tonics, juices and sparkling water, with reusable, recyclable packaging designed to be upcycled.

C&C: Hi Avit! Can you tell us a bit about the early days of JIVA? Where did the idea come from and how did the business get started?

Avit: JIVA is almost ten years old and we started in early 2015. At that point, people didn’t know what kombucha was - it was a vinegary, fermented drink and people weren’t used to fermented drinks back then. 

My background is as a distiller up in north QLD, so I learned how to distil Australia’s first white rum and other spirits and a lot of liqueurs (which are fermented), which finished in ‘06. Fast forward to 2015 and kombucha was in its super early stages - it was the first fermented drink. At the time, cold pressed juices were a big thing, but then people got scared of them because they had so much sugar. They started falling off the shelves, but we knew at the time that people loved cold pressed juices but were scared of the sugar, so we created a cold-pressed juice style kombucha, which is what JIVA is - meaning we flavour, sweeten and colour with real juice. We don’t use or believe in natural flavours - I don’t know what is natural about an ingredient that is 40% ethanol. 

We still make our kombucha the same way we did ten years ago. It’s super light tasting and less than three percent sugar (and that sugar is from real juice). It started as a bit of a hobby, I started making it at home and then we moved to a ten square metre facility, which is roughly half the size of a bedroom. It was such a small room that only one person could be in the room at a time, so I was fermenting, pressing the juice, filling the bottles and going out and delivering. After delivering, I did some sales with leftover bottles that we had. It was a revolving door of making, delivering, selling. Back then, there was a Harris Farm-style chain called About Life. We got into About Life and realised we had to move from our small facility to a fifty square metre facility, which we were in for about a year and a half.  Long story short - we were doing only kombucha from 2015 - 2019 and it became quite a fad in that period, just like any other product (for example, coconut water was a fad ten years ago and everyone was making it). Then COVID-19 came, so we were working on a range of shots (immunity, detox, beauty shots etc), which really helped us through that time period. Until COVID-19, we were very foodservice strong with lots of cafés and foodservice wasn’t functioning the same during this time - you couldn’t go inside and could only get takeaway. Thankfully, we’d created these immunity shots and immunity was on trend, which saved us through this time. 

We changed from just being a kombucha brand to being a wellness beverage brand. Everyone tends to be in this ‘better for you’ category, but the words ‘better for you’ tend to mean ‘a little bit less sugar and it’s better for you’ - we don’t really play into that and we’re moreso a wellness brand where every JIVA product has a wellness aspect to it. Kombucha is a very competitive space, before COVID-19 there were around 43 brands and I think there’s only 4-5 commercial brands at the moment. Once a category gets out of the fad space, everything is very price driven. Supermarkets have trained shoppers to look out for discounts and you unfortunately have to play the system.

C&C: On your website, you mention that your philosophy takes into account that ‘wellness is first and foremost about how you feel’. What does this mean to you in the context of JIVA and has that had an impact on the products that you create?

Avit: JIVA means ‘life’ in Sanskrit - so we wanted to create ‘life’ products and do other wellness beverages and so that’s how we changed from being a kombucha brand to a wellness brand. We’ve got a long way to go with a big change happening next year with JIVA going into products out of the fridge too. We’ve got a big pipeline of diverse products. 

We’re getting to a point where JIVA covers a lot of different spaces in the fridge. We’ve got the kombucha which is gut health, six different tonics and the Enhanced Sparkling Waters in the functional water market. We’ve also just launched a range of juice. We get a lot of our data from the US - and whatever happens in the US usually happens here a few years later. If you look back fifteen years ago, there was Coke, then Diet Coke, then Coke turned to soft drinks and soft drinks turned to the word sodas. Sodas are something that is not as full bodied, a lot less sweet and a lot less sugar. The next step after that is to get into functional waters, so super low in sugar with a bit of ‘function’ or ‘wellness’. You can see the gap closing over time and tending towards sparkling water. We don’t have the deepest pockets for marketing, so what we try to do is go to the category and do it best. In our kombucha for example, aside from our recyclable, reusable packaging, we use a green and white tea which is quite rare in the kombucha space.

C&C: How do you find that this affects the flavour and by extension the uptake of people buying the kombucha?

Avit: A lot of people use green tea and black tea - we don’t use black tea at all, but black tea is $5/kilo and our white tea is $77/kilo and you get a total different aroma from white and green tea notes. The antioxidants are also higher in the white tea and the acidity levels are different. As you can imagine, the comparison between white and black tea is chalk and cheese in terms of how smooth the white tea is compared to a black tea. Given that kombucha is already an acidic drink, I think the black tea really adds to that vinegar taste.

People that don’t really like kombucha really love our kombucha, with simple flavours and a much lighter vinegar profile. It also has a light spritz instead of being a full carbonated product. Anyone that is really into their wellness has really understood our product as a result of how raw and real the ingredients are. It’s simply just two ingredients: 95% kombucha and 5% real cold pressed juice, which we press onsite. 

C&C: As JIVA has grown as a business, have you found that keeping the products Australian made with all natural ingredients is challenging or difficult, or is it something that you prioritise because it sets you apart from other brands?

Avit: It is difficult, that’s for sure. We do make a very expensive product. The swing top bottles are way more expensive than a standard bottle that you can get from a local manufacturer. The purpose of these bottles is that we try to make people feel guilty for throwing out our packaging - we want it to be upcycled. That’s us trying to lower our footprint and create an upcycled ‘side’ to our brand - we call it upcycling rather than recycling. We have a bit of a cult following and people use our bottles for water, chilli oils, to re-ferment kombucha in the bottles and things like that. This resonates really well with our consumers because it’s in line with wellness and who they are. After COVID-19, everything has become super expensive and our motto has always been to do more for less and that is how we’re able to sell our product at the same price as everyone else on the shelf, be innovating and have the cleanest, raw ingredients. We haven’t had any price increases and we cop that internally in order to be competitive in the market and offer the best possible product at the right price, especially in a time where everyone is looking for value. 

C&C: Have you found this to be a more sustainable and effective way of packaging the products overtime? 

Avit: Yes, we don’t want to change the ethos of who we are because we have a very particular and aware consumer. They can really understand the product. The easiest and cheapest thing for us to do would be for us to change our juice to a natural flavour which would meet efficiencies and costs. But would that resonate with our consumer? I don’t think so. So it’s something that we deal with internally in this expensive market.

C&C: Can you tell us a bit more about your Enhanced Sparkling Waters and why you wanted to create an enhanced water product?

Avit: First and foremost, to really grow our wellness message. Wellness means a lot of things to a lot of people and at the moment hydration, wellness and focus are a big topic. We found that this is what is important to people that are actively seeking better products for their health. 

So we created three different Enhanced Waters, one that has electrolytes which is the Hydration Boost. It’s a super simple product - it’s sparkling water with electrolytes and watermelon and cucumber extract, that’s it. We have a cucumber extract in there that is super unique and no one has. We’ve got so much flavour out of a product that doesn’t have flavours and has the littlest bit of juice.

We also have the Daily Greens, which has super greens powder and watermelon extract, apple juice and sparkling water. The third product is Bright Focus - I think there is quite a craze happening at the moment about clarity and mental focus, so that has the golden oak mushroom in it and apple and pomegranate flavour. 

We created this product to increase the wellness message of JIVA and to be ‘on market’ or ‘on trend’, so to speak. It’s to be innovative and one of the first to market, if not the first to market. We’ve been one of the first to market with kombucha, the tonics and the Enhanced Sparkling Waters.

C&C: As you were one of the first to market, what has the process of getting the products ‘on the shelf’ been like? How did you gradually move into supermarkets, independent retailers etc?

Avit: Education is the biggest challenge, being one of the early players into market. It requires a lot of support from our end with in store demos, doing promotions for people to taste the product. The best way for someone to like your product is to be enticed by it and that might be with an introductory price or a good looking product to start with and then fingers crossed that they will like the product. Take the tonics for example (which we launched in 2020) - sales were good and we thought ‘is this it?’. But as time went on and we ran more tastings and promotions, we saw that our sales were really picking up in line with people understanding the products.

C&C: In that process of getting the products ready for the shelf and going through that evolution, why did you end up working with a distributor and why did you choose to work with Cartel & Co? 

Avit: I met Hayssam five years ago and we’ve become quite good friends. We started in a funny way - we were foodservice drawn as a brand at the time, which is not what Cartel & Co do. We had a distributor that had unfortunately done some damage to us because they were focussed on other products. Someone introduced us to Hayssam and I sat down with him as if I had just come out of a ten year relationship - it was like a first date, I was saying ‘oh mate, this is how I feel’ and he was so funny. Long story short, I’m shocked with the growth that we’ve had with Hayssam and the team. I’m the guy that comes to the Cartel & Co Christmas party and I give the same speech every single time. I say ‘I’ve spoken to Hayssam, we’ve come to a difficult decision to ban all other brands being sold by Cartel & Co and it’s just going to be JIVA’ every Christmas. Give me another two years and they’ll just be an exclusive JIVA distributor.

I love the team - it’s 70% laughing about nothing and 30% planning. The growth between us is great every month. We had our biggest month with Cartel & Co two months ago and it was in winter and we’re a beverage brand! It works really well and I'm really happy with that. 

C&C: If I was brand new to the JIVA world, which product of yours would you recommend that I try first?

Avit: I’ll have to give you a favourite out of each range. I’m going through a Mango & Passionfruit kombucha phase, the Reset tonic, Hydration Boost and the Glow Juice Story. It’s like you’re asking me to choose between one of my kids. I’ll call you at 3 in the morning and say ‘I’ve changed my mind!’

–