For greater than a decade, Sakara Life, founded by Danielle DuBoise and Whitney Tingle, has been serving consumers plant-rich meals and health-boosting supplements and powders. 

Now, the brand is venturing into the premixed drink category with Metabolism “Latte” Cellular-Energy Boost, $14, which is launching exclusively at Erewhon on Monday.

While Erewhon has been a key partner for Sakara Life over time, with the health food store stocking limited-edition collaborations and its powders and supplements, the brand new latte will probably be a everlasting fixture on the retailer within the grab-and-go drink aisle. DuBoise and Tingle attribute the brand’s success with the retailer to their overlapping consumer base. 

Erewhon, which currently operates nine stores across California with openings on the horizon, is a favourite of influencers like Hailey Bieber and Kourtney Kardashian Barker, who each partnered with the shop to create custom smoothies. The Erewhon hashtag on TikTok totals nearly 325 million views.

“They’re [Erewhon] really within the cultural zeitgeist in the intervening time, and so is Sakara Life. We actually get to influence the way in which people eat products and get introduced to the brand,” said Rebecca Angus Smith, chief marketing officer at Sakara Life. “Erewhon’s audience and our audience is amazingly aligned.” 

“It’s almost like having an introduction through a friend,” said Tingle, of introducing customers to Sakara through partnerships with like-minded brands. “With the change with the iOS and targeting becoming tougher, partnerships are an ideal option to know that you just’re targeting a consumer that likely can be serious about what you might have to supply.” 

The brand also recently partnered with Bella Hadid and Kin Euphorics, a non-alcoholic spirit company.  

“These brand partnerships are a option to infuse joy and never only remind a complete latest set of eyeballs but remind everyone inside our current orbit that once we say joy is a nutrient we actually mean it,” DuBoise said. 

Other than infusing joy, these brand collaborations are key drivers for the business, because the brand has turned down most retail partners thus far, in line with DuBoise.

“That’s to not say that can without end be the case but thus far, that’s been the case and something that we’ve been really focused on because there’s a lot education,” DuBoise said. “One among the pieces of education that is difficult in direct-to-consumer is convincing those that nourishing and caring for yourself can actually be delicious as well.” 

While consumers are actually flocking to stores like Erewhon for nutritous foods, Sakara Life got here to fruition during a unique era. 

“I remember once we began and we had to inform people what wellness meant and what plant-rich meant. We’ve come a good distance,” said DuBoise. 

Now, as consumers are more health conscious than ever, nutrition is a key pillar. The healthy eating, nutrition and weight reduction sector accounts for $702 billion of the worldwide wellness economy, in line with the Global Wellness Institute.

Sakara Life has tapped into that growth, with a slow and regular approach since its launch in 2012. While the brand is a non-public company and doesn’t share sales figures, industry sources estimate it can close 2023 with $150 million in sales. The brand attributes its growth to a mission-driven approach to creating the business. 

“We are saying it’s our job to seduce people into caring for themselves,” DuBoise said. 

While Sakara Life was built on nutrition through its signature subscription meal plans, the team dove into supplements and ingestibles with products like its Metabolism Super Powder, $90, featured within the Erewhon latte. This continues to be a key pillar for the brand, but DuBoise and Tingle view it as a component of Sakara Life’s larger picture as an alternative of a separate vertical. 

“For a chapter we were really fascinated by [non-food] products as one other growth engine. What we’ve learned is we don’t must select. They serve an incredible purpose each of them individually for very different clients,” DuBoise said. “Some people come to us just for our prenatal, some come for under our food, but what we were forgetting is that the mix and the synergy between the products is amazingly powerful.” 

To harness this synergy between supplemental products and meals going forward, Sakara Life launched its systems last yr, which permit consumers to check out several of the brand’s offerings in a targeted program — Cleanse, Metabolic Reset and Gut Health to call just a few. Not only does this approach allow consumers to check out Sakara Life’s broad offerings however it’s a spot where the brand can launch latest programming based on customer insights. For instance, there’s been an uptick in consumers asking about perimenopause and menopause, leading Sakara to develop a latest system for girls on this stage of their life, in line with DuBoise. 

This open, highly engaged relationship between Sakara Life and its customers has been a driver, especially as education is essential for the business. Since founding the brand, DuBoise and Tingle have harnessed multiple platforms to teach and connect, including Sakara Life’s social channels, The Sakara Life podcast, S-Life Mag and their personal channels — DuBoise noted their social manager recently got her a hoop light to create higher quality content.

“We’ve a big audience, slightly below 500,000 on Instagram. We’ve had near one million downloads now on our podcast, a big email list and client base,” Tingle said. “We’ve garnered a variety of trust with our client base and with our audience, and so it’s bringing in the suitable experts and sharing our standpoint of what we all know and what we’ve at all times known about health and nutrition and food.” 

With partnerships and education on the forefront of the business, capital isn’t top of mind. Over the past 10-plus years, Sakara Life has raised greater than $19 million in funding. “We’ve at all times been very deliberate with capital raising. When we have now a necessity for added capital for a selected purpose, we’ll exit and lift that capital,” said Tingle. “There’s potential that we’ll raise money again in the long run for a selected need and with the suitable investors that support Sakara’s mission and vision and supreme success.”