Skip to main content

What's Crowdfunding got to do with Encouraging Healthier Lifestyles?

Maintaining a healthy lifestyle is one of the best “preventative medicine” steps we can take. The founder of medicine, Hippocrates, said in 400 B.C. “Let medicine be thy food and let food be thy medicine” and for centuries doctors, dietitians, nutritionists, and nutritional therapists everywhere have talked about the role that food plays in health and how you feel on a day to day basis.
Dr Hua He and I are two co-founders of a British based startup that is on a mission to encourage healthier lifestyles across Britain and the world. Hua has worked for many years in the medical field to research and develop new drugs that can make sick people better (or at least ease some of the symptoms of illness). She was born in China and grew up with the traditional health & wellness knowledge of Green tea and other fruit & botanicals that had become part of everyday life in the “Middle Kingdom” for over 4,000 years. Green tea was known since ancient times as a medicinal drink and she learnt since childhood that drinking it daily is hugely helpful maintaining good health.
I was born in Trinidad (yes! I'm an “island girl”) and grew up around lots of fresh fruit and natural drinks. Now a proud Brit and Londoner, I worked on many food & drink innovation projects for global consumer goods companies before taking time out to qualify as a lawyer, finally hanging up my “corporate boots” in 2015. I am also a volunteer magistrate and healthier drinks advocate. “I could see the trend starting for folks craving healthier drinks and wanting to cut down on sugar consumption, but I was frustrated to see so few drinks on shelf that were good and did good too. Even today, the pace of change is still so slow. For example, PepsiCo announced this week that by 2025 at least 2/3 of their drinks will have 100 calories or fewer from added sugar per 12 oz (340ml) serving! Another 200,000 people would have died in the UK before their time from diabetes by 2025!”

Wanting to share traditional ancient health & wellness wisdom is what led Hua to co-found a healthy drinks startup –Tg green teas - with me. Our mission is to try to improve what is on food & drink shelves in shops up and down the country and nudge folks into adding a bit of green tea to their daily routine, instead of sugary soft drinks. Ensuring there are enough tasty and affordable green tea options available will of course help to encourage folks to try and adopt a new habit.
Our iced green tea range is specially formulated to taste good, look good and do good. The award winning drinks have 3 unique features which caught the attention of Tesco and other leading retailers in the UK:
  1. It’s real brewed tea and bottled without malic acid nor other artificial tea taste enhancers.
  2. It contains less than 1/3 of the sugar in the leading iced tea in the UK and even less than ½ of the sugar in coconut water. It proudly displays an all-green traffic light nutritional panel.
  3. Our British bottled green teas are thoughtfully blended with ancient wellness ingredients from the same traditional source including a new-to-the-UK Jujube “super fruit” (with 7 times more Vitamin C than blueberries).
Tesco, the largest food & drink supermarket chain in the UK and a top 5 global retailer, recently invited us onto a new-to-the-world web platform “Backit” that supports up and coming brands raise funds to help them scale up to be ready for listing in larger stores. We are "crowdfunding" via this "Backit" platform.
In addition to helping us raise funds to get on store shelves, you will get to try our hot & iced green teas before much of the rest of the world does and enjoy other rewards like smoothie blenders, portable tea infusers, money off vouchers for our e-shop worth up to £25, and even your very own office tea party!
If you like what we are trying to doing regarding helping to fix what's on store shelves, please support us by donating £25, £50 or more to our campaign. Our crowdfunding campaign ends on 31st October. Please donate via our Backit crowdfunding pagehttps://backit.tesco.com/p/Drinktg where you can also read more about the Tg green tea story. If you are not UK based you can donate however I will send you a special "reward" depending on where in the world you are located. And let me know when you have pledged so that I can thank you personally.

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Is sugar the new tobacco? Yes!....unless we do more

Ian Quinn 's article in  The Grocer , " FDF head calls out NHS boss over sugar claims " [subscription may be required] covers the Food and Drink Federation's response to a comment  NHS  head  Simon Stevens ' made in a  BBC  interview over the weekend in which he suggested  the obesity crisis  was the " new smoking ". Soft Drink and Tobacco parallels As someone who’s worked in both the  soft drink and tobacco industries , I empathise with Simon Stevens linking obesity with smoking. After sitting through thousands of interviews with smokers up and down the country talking about obstacles to quitting tobacco etc. – and observing numerous food & drink consumer research before and since then – it’s clear that there are huge parallels between triggers of the emerging obesity crisis and smoking e.g. pitched initially as “ cool ” and a “ lifestyle/generational choice ” (especially  soft drinks ) but later becoming hard to shake off owing to physica
Post a Comment
Read more

Is Kraft Heinz dropping the Unilever acquisition just an interlude?

(c) 2012 Convergence Alimentaire blog image I cut my FMCG marketing teeth  at Unilever and ended my full-time global food & drink industry career at Kraft/Mondelez. I now run a  healthier drinks startup  business ( drinktg.com ) alongside a global innovation consultancy where I work as an  "extrapreneur"  supporting companies wanting to remake their portfolios to better fit emerging consumer needs for healthier products......so I am perhaps in a unique position to give a point of view.  If you are Dutch or British, you  feel closer culturally to Unilever  and few people living in the UK will have forgotten Kraft's poor treatment of people & assets post  Cadbury's acquisition . However, the reality is that the  vision and values of both companies are not so dissimilar  and both are facing the same  fundamental shifts  in consumer behaviour & needs in relation to "big FMCG/CPG" brands in both developed and the "developing" world.
Post a Comment
Read more

Let them drink birch! 3 reasons why we shouldn't

The new "sweet spot" for soft drinks today After many years' marketing/innovating brands for global food & drink companies (including Coca-Cola and Unilever), I opted to launch a beverage #startup in order to respond quicker/better to evolving health & wellness trends. After reviewing numerous consumer, retailer & market research data and chatting with folks up and down the country on what they were looking for in a healthier drink while testing prototypes, it is clear that consumers are looking for 3 things these days from their beverage choice, namely (i) less of the "bad stuff", (ii) more innate, natural functionality, and (iii) something that can be "daily habit forming". Being able to deliver on all 3 consumer "wants" is in my view the "sweet spot" for a soft drink today. The essence of this "sweet spot" is shown here: A retailer response that would make Marie Antoinette proud Getting to
Post a Comment
Read more