Graduating from the kitchen to the lab

Wombat was born on our kitchen worktop.

Before we had an Instagram page, Shopify account, or even a name, we had a big mixing tank, a SodaStream and a very firm idea of what good ginger beer and cloudy lemonade tasted like, but very little idea on how to actually make it.

We spent a few weeks researching the best methodologies and competitor recipes (which are mostly locked down, understandably) and kicked things off. Our mission was clear from the outset – no artificial flavours, no high sugar content and no preservatives.

Our first ginger beer recipes consisted of shop-bought natural ginger juice, different ginger flavours, cane sugar and 95% Polish vodka. After our 9-5s and on the weekends we’d work through different recipe iterations, trying out different flavour combinations and sugar content with varying levels of success.

We were able to get some good results from the kitchen, but we weren’t equipped to scale the products, so it was time to get the flavour houses and food scientists involved.

Whilst we were always planning to launch the products in the UK, we only spoke to developers in Australia to help us to commercialise our recipes. There’s alcoholic ginger beer and cloudy lemonade on practically every tap across Australia, so there’s a much greater awareness and knowledge of the product than in the UK.

This did add an air of complexity to the brief, as we didn’t want to be flying in botanicals from Byron Bay. We needed someone who could use ingredients available in the UK/Europe to save us from expensive shipping and longer lead times.

After speaking with a few different developers, there was often an expectation to run the production after the initial recipe consultation. This was never an option for us as it wouldn’t be commercially viable to produce our drinks in Australia and import to the UK. We found ourselves being priced out of some quotes with developers seemingly seeing little benefit in working just on the development.

A few weeks of conversations later though, and we finally found our developer. With supply chains across Europe and having worked with some of the biggest seltzer brands in Australia, they had the pallet and the passport to get our recipes commercialised.

We kicked off development in June, working hand-in-hand with our partners on our Alcoholic Ginger beer and Alcoholic Cloudy Lemonade.

The brief? Light, sessionable, and nothing artificial.