Derek and Ariel washed ashore in New Zealand after sailing here as a family from Seattle, USA, in 2015. Ariel studied at Wellpark College and got her diploma in Naturopathic Nutrition and Derek took a professional brewing course at America's oldest beer school, the Siebel Institute. Derek began brewing beer and Ariel began pushing him into brewing kombucha. He finally made the switch and started focussing all his attention on brewing the best organic kombucha.

Unlike supermarket kombucha, New Leaf never add any flavourings, colourings or preservatives. And they believe you can’t make good kombucha with bad tea, so they import organic tea leaves directly from growers around the world. Being tea importers ensures the freshness and quality of the tea leaves they brew with. All the teas they use are certified organic or are organically grown with direct contact to each farmer. As Derek says "Pesticides don’t know when to stop killing and we don’t want them in our kombucha!"

They small batch brew everything on site right here in Auckland with just four ingredients: filtered water, organic tea leaves, organic cane sugar, and their organic kombucha culture.