Today we’d like to introduce you to Grant Ruhlman.
Hi Grant, we’d love for you to start by introducing yourself
I have always been a nature lover, and in 2012 I through-hiked the Appalachian Trail from Georgia to Maine. After walking those 2,200 miles, I wanted to stick around for a while to experience life in Maine. I arranged a work stay on an organic farm and quickly fell in love with the lifestyle and satisfaction of seeing the literal fruits of your labor. As a happy hour, the farm crew would go into town for a kombucha.
I became really intrigued by living foods such as kombucha and fermented vegetables and began to craft some of my own. When the winter came, I moved back home to NC and continued my fermenting hobby. I worked for Durham Public Schools as a farm educator and garden manager at the DPS Hub Farm and sold small batches of home-brewed kombucha to friends and neighbors. Slowly but surely, the energy from my kombucha brewing grew until I launched it as an official business.
We gained a lot of traction with our presence at the Vega Art Market on Hunt Street, and eventually the Downtown Durham Farmer’s Market. In 2018, I stepped away from farming in order to pursue Homebucha full time, and we now service over 40 accounts throughout the Triangle and continue to serve at the Durham and Chapel Hill Farmers Markets.
Can you talk to us a bit about the challenges and lessons you’ve learned along the way? Looking back would you say it’s been easy or smooth in retrospect?
While there are always struggles with small businesses, we have been on a slow and steady organic growth trajectory. We’ve had very little capital investment, so our growth has been dictated by a cycle of selling kombucha, reinvesting in equipment, selling more kombucha, reinvesting, and so on.
While kombucha is an ancient beverage, the kombucha industry in the US is fairly young. We’ve had to engineer our own solutions and figure out a lot of the processes on our own. That is a slow process, but we think that it has added to the authenticity of our brand, which is still rooted in small batch production and strong local relationships.
Great, so let’s talk business. Can you tell our readers more about what you do and what you think sets you apart from others?
We are a 100% locally owned craft kombucha company based in Durham, NC. We specialize in producing truly natural and traditionally brewed kombucha that is accessible for all palates. Kombucha has seen a huge rise in popularity, but it still is mostly thought of as a “hippie” or “yogi” drink. We are really proud to make a kombucha that crosses those cultural boundaries.
One of the best compliments we get at events is “wow, this doesn’t suck!” from folks who never thought they would enjoy a kombucha. We’re really proud of that, and think it comes from our dedication to high-quality ingredients and letting the fermentation process play out naturally without trying to force it at an industrial scale.
Our name, Homebucha, comes from a respect for our homebrew roots, which still inform the process of our production. We’re also all about relationships and are on a first-name basis with so many of our regular customers and supporters. That really makes us in the business of community and brings a lot of joy to what we do.
What’s next?
Our future plans include more of the same – continuing to produce one of the tastiest kombuchas available and slowly scaling up to meet demand without sacrificing the integrity of our product and brand. We are so blessed in the Triangle to have such a local-loving food scene, and almost all of our wholesale accounts are other small locally owned businesses.
Our marketing has always been based on where we personally like to shop, and we find those accounts to be the most successful to us. We look forward to continuing to grow our “mom and pop” network of locally-owned restaurants, coffee shops, bars, and bodegas. Those are the most satisfying accounts to be in relation with, and the small business community really holds one another up. We just transitioned from our longtime production of glass bottles into cans, and are really pleased with both the design (shouts to Raleigh-based artist Ariana Gershman!) and the quality of the product. For the first run, we’re releasing 2 of our most loved kombucha flavors: Bright and Bite (lemon ginger) and Lavender Dreams (blueberry lavender).
These are already starting to roll out on shelves throughout the Triangle, and we’ll continue to produce kegs for our accounts that feature Homebucha on tap. It is really exciting to see kombucha taking off as a non-alcoholic alternative at bars and breweries, and we really want to grow that sector of our business to meet the demand. There is no reason that every bar that serves beer shouldn’t also have kombucha on tap, and we hope to be a strong part of that movement.
We also just set up a few small accounts in Western NC, and in the long term would love to see a Homebucha presence in both the Triangle and greater Asheville regions.
Contact Info:
- Website: homebucha.net
- Instagram: instagram.com/home.bucha
Find Homebucha at the Durham Farmers Market every Saturday, all four Weaver Street Markets, The Durham Co Op, and at local shops and breweries throughout the Triangle!
