FedUp Foods, the largest private-label fermented beverage manufacturer in North America, is beginning its next chapter of growth with a third production facility in Wilmington, North Carolina, slated to open this fall.

Founded in 2008, FedUp Foods traces its origin to home-brewing kombucha in 5-gallon jars to become an industry leader, producing functional beverages like kombucha, prebiotic and probiotic sodas, and cold brew coffee. Today, the company uses a proprietary, scalable fermentation brewing process and serves nine of the 12 top private label programs in North America.

The company has two manufacturing sites: Ashville, North Carolina, and Irwin, Tennessee. After searching properties in 17 states, FedUp Foods found a nearly new, 60,000-square-foot former craft brewery on the coast of North Carolina.

FedUp Foods & Its Next Chapter of Functional Beverages

Zane Adams, co-founder, and executive vice president of Strategy and Development, shares more about FedUp Foods’ journey and the company’s latest production facility.

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“We learned to brew kombucha from our beer brothers and sisters, so we use essentially exact same equipment. There's some changes that we'll make, like we do an open-air fermentation and a cool ship in our Asheville plant, so we'll replicate that. And there's a little bit of nuance and change in packaging,” said Zane Adams, co-founder, and executive vice president of Strategy and Development at FedUp Foods.

 After searching properties in 17 states, FedUp Foods found a nearly new, 60,000-square-foot former craft brewery on the coast of North Carolina. Courtesy FedUp Foods.
Wilmington will be the company’s largest production facility and anchor its new coffee innovation.

“A lot of people drink coffee – it's not as obscure or unknown as kombucha, and so our thought is, how do we begin to come into a space where we can make coffee a bit more functional?” Adams said.  “We're really excited about bringing forward a functional coffee that's accessible and delicious to the masses, as it were. We think that coffee is one of those crops that really give us an opportunity to kind of farm our footprint, and is a really accessible way – working with developing countries that really value regenerative agriculture at the same level we do – so this really gives us a chance to enhance our supply chain.”

FedUp Foods is the only regeneratively grown kombucha in the U.S.

“We don't want to just build a food company. We want to help anchor a food movement and thinking about what the future of food looks like,” Adams said.

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