Kombucha 221 BC: Living, Sparkling Tea

Shortly after the birth of her daughter seven years ago, Aneta Lundquist underwent a dietary renaissance. Compelled to improve the health of her growing family, the Sarasota mother began clearing out her pantry and consciously cleansing her body. She took a class on cooking wild fermented foods. There, she discovered the magic of kombucha.

“My passion is food and I’ve always been in the kitchen. But when my daughter was born, it made me look at my life from a different angle,” she says. “We started turning our life in a new direction.” She and her husband, Eric, were running a boat-cleaning business in Wisconsin at the time, and Aneta Lundquist craved a career change. Kombucha kept calling her—this living, sparkling tea full of B vitamins, acids and organic enzymes that she had researched. She started making it by fermenting her own tea using a symbiotic colony of bacteria and yeast (SCOBY). Her husband suggested that they sell the organic, handcrafted beverage.

It took Aneta Lundquist a year to perfect her four flavors: ginger, lemon-lime-cayenne, raspberry-hibiscus and orange-turmeric-cinnamon. Then came the packaging and labeling. Because the first recorded use of kombucha was in China in 221 B.C. during the Tsin Dynasty (when it was known as the “tea of immortality” and was said to be a cure-all for diseases), the Lundquists called their brand Kombucha 221 B.C.

“Kombucha has live enzymes and helps break down your food so you can absorb vitamins and minerals,” Aneta Lundquist says. “We have had a huge response to it, an amazing response.”

The Lundquists first promoted the kombucha at the Sarasota Farmers’ Market in December 2014. Simon’s Coffee House began carrying the product on tap. CROPJuice. Detwiler’s Farm Market, Fit Fuel, Poppo’s Taqueria and numerous businesses followed suit. The Lundquists began outputting more than 10,000 bottles each month at their 2,000-squarefoot Sarasota facility, as customers rapidly picked up on the healthy power of Kombucha 221 B.C. Even co-owner Eric Lundquist is one of the converts.

“I used to follow the Standard American Diet. I was always tired and needed Mountain Dew on a daily basis. Luckily, my wife helped me transition to a ‘human diet.’ I still don’t understand how she accomplished it,” Eric Lundquist says. “I was a hardcore deep-fried-food lover and the only vegetable I enjoyed was onion rings. With time, I felt so good on my new food diet that I told my wife she needed to spread this great way of living to the world. Now, here we are.”

► Kombucha 221 B.C.: 4545 Mariotti Ct Suite H, Sarasota;941-374-7522; kombucha221bc.com