Eat the Change, the company co-founded by Honest tea co-creator Seth Goldman, announced the first four of six flavors it plans to release for its new brand Just Ice Tea.
Varieties will include a blend of black tea and lemonade; an herbal offering brewed with hibiscus flowers and blackberry leaves; green tea; and green tea with honey. A pair of additional flavors will be announced during the next two weeks. With the exception of green tea, Eat the Change said it is withholding the names and labels until the official debut.
Just Ice Tea, which is expected to hit shelves later this year, will include a few varieties inspired by the most popular offerings under the Honest tea line that Coca-Cola plans to discontinue later this year. For example, the herbal variety is modeled after Honest tea’s Black Forest Berry, one of the first five varieties that launched with the brand in 1998.
Honest Tea’s most popular flavor variety is a combination of green tea with honey. The Eat the Change product will include two types of green tea leaves, organic agave and honey.
Unlike Honest tea’s Honey Green Tea, which contains organic cane sugar, Eat the Change is using organic agave as a sweetener. The company doesn’t use ingredients from six crops that represent 57% of all agricultural production in an effort to support biodiversity in agriculture. One of those crops is sugar cane.
Eat the Change noted in a blog post that even though “some might disagree with the use of an animal-derived product” in honey, when the ingredient is responsibly sourced, it can protect the bees’ life cycle and the integrity of the honey.
“When deciding on our final launch varieties, we have done our best to take into account hundreds of requests from loyal Honest Tea fans who are super-passionate about their bottled tea,” Goldman and his Eat the Change co-founder chef Spike Mendelsohn said in a series of blog posts on company’s website. “And while none of our recipes is exactly the same as the Honest formulations, they will be recognizable and we think, even more tasty.”
The Eat the Change tea will be packaged in a 16-ounce glass bottle, the same one used to launch Honest tea more than two decades ago. It will include real tea leaves as well as organic and Fair Trade ingredients.
Just Ice Tea will be part of Eat the Change, a two-year-old startup making environmentally friendly, nutrient-dense snacks from carrots, mushrooms and other plant ingredients. Last month, Eat the Change raised $14.5 million for its Just Ice Tea to set up and scale production and commit to major purchases of bottles, caps, tea and ingredients.
