The 2018 Entrepreneur of the Year Award was presented to Natalie Lynn, Counterpart Kombucha, by Joe Boylan, executive director of Wilkes-Barre Connect, left, and John Phillips, owner MCR Productions.
Read MoreNatalie Lynn shows no signs of slowing down.
Her business, Counterpart Kombucha, formerly Natalie’s Craft Kombucha, is being sold in three states, comes in 19 flavors – ranging from herbal and floral to sweet– and has a steady following on social media.
“We call it the ‘booch fam,’” she said.
Kombucha is a fermented beverage that starts with caffeinated black or green tea and sugar, which are ingested by a symbiotic colony of bacteria and yeast, or a scoby, yielding probiotics that can aid in digestion, immune support and other health areas.
Lynn said her customers have experienced improvements in conditions such as irritable bowel syndrome, Crohn’s disease, colitis and acid reflux disease. She also said kombucha is known to help those suffering from arthritis and skin conditions.
“What I love about being a small business is I get to hear these things,” Lynn said. “Science has been catching up to the trend of kombucha as it’s been happening. I was hoping there would be something to validate what I’ve been saying. A lot stems from gut health.”
Read MoreOf all the fizzy tonics and gut-healing drinks out there, kombucha has stolen our hearts. We admit: For the uninitiated, it can be a tough sell. Tangy fermented tea might not sound like the most appealing thing to sip, but we’ve seen it happen over and over again — once they try it, even skeptics are hooked. Effervescent, sweet-tart, endlessly customizable in terms of flavors, and wondrously restorative for gut health, “booch” is the reigning queen of the wellness beverage world.
The kombucha trend has gone full-on mainstream, with national brands on the shelves of supermarkets and on the menus at many bars, breweries and restaurants. Pennsylvania is home to an impressive number of kombucha artisans, and a name we’ve been seeing around more frequently over the past few years is Natalie’s Craft Kombucha. With pretty packaging, inventive flavors and a good-sized Instagram following, Natalie’s seems to have tapped into the stylish, trend-forward vibe of kombucha (versus the health food/hippie vibe), and the more we looked into her brand, the more curious we became and the more we wanted to learn more. Who is Natalie, we wondered, and how did she find her way into a career in kombucha?
We were able to chat with this Pa.-native about her growing business, which is currently in the middle of rebranding and is now called Counterpart Kombucha
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