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The Week in Germany: Business and Technology October 27, 2006 Bionade Quenches German Thirst for Natural Beverages A fermented soft drink? When inventor and brewer Dieter Leiphold told his friends in the food and beverage industry about his dream of producing an all natural, alcohol-free beverage using yeast and bacteria colonies, all he got was question marks. Today, German consumers are with exclamation points and guzzling Leiphold’s “Bionade” faster than his small family business can produce it – 70 million bottles this year, to be precise.
Brewed with organic barley, juice concentrates, herbal flavorings, and less sugar than other soft drinks, Bionade has become the organic cult drink number one in Germany. At the heart of the process is a bacteria obtained from the kombucha colony, a mushroom-like mass of yeast and bacteria living in symbiosis. Leiphold succeeded in isolating the bacteria that would transform the sugars in the malt into gluconic acid instead of alcohol. The gluconic acid, otherwise only found in honey, lends Bionade its signature tart yet sweet taste. From the Bathtub to the Bottle: Not Your Ordinary Moonshine Before Leiphold invented his “Fanta without chemicals,” he was brewmaster at the Peter brewery in the small northern Bavarian town of Ostheim. In the 1980s, small breweries like Peter lost market share as larger players like Warsteiner and König emerged as national brands and consumers increasingly chose non-alcoholic lemonades that were available in every stripe and flavor. Faced with declining revenues, Leiphold and his wife (and Peter brewery owner) Sigrid made ends meet by opening disco that served guests from nearby towns and GIs on their way to the Persian Gulf. Not content to run a nightclub, the trained brewmaster holed up in his laboratory, where he developed the process for Bionade. In 1995, after 8 years of work and 3 million Deutschmarks of investment, Leiphold began producing Bionade commercially. Bavarian Nectar Even after the process had been perfected, it still took years before the (other) Bavarian nectar flowed freely through throughout Germany. Local consumers did not know what to make of the strange brew that was neither beer nor soda, and Bionade had to look for a break on the national market. That break came in Hamburg in 1998, when a the popular bar Gloria began serving Bionade, which quickly became the favored beverage of the hip set of media and advertising professionals that call Hamburg home. Today, German media is celebrating Bionade as a modern day David, surviving amongst the Goliaths of the international beverage industry. In fact, Bionade turned down an offer from Coca Cola to purchase the company in 2004. Later, the company did seal a distribution with Coke, and German consumers can now buy Bionade at the Frankfurt Airport, on high-speed ICE trains, the Daimler Chrysler factory canteen, a growing list of grocers, and even IKEA stores. For now, Peter Kowalsky, Siegrid Leipold’s son and managing director of Bionade, is just struggling to keep up with demand. “We have to constantly ask the outlets to be patient,” Kowalsky told Stern Magazine. He has a plan for how to do that: “At the moment, we need 100 tons of organic elderflower concentrate per year. In the future, I want to buy this from the Rhoen district [around Ostheim]. The first fifty acres have already been sown.” Links
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