Always wanted to know how exactly your favorite Bevi flavors are made? Mystery can be alluring, but not when it comes to our food—then it’s just off-putting. If you’re like us, you feel better when you know where your food comes from. So, we’re here to bare our souls. Let’s get into it.
First: The idea
Every flavor starts with an idea. From our minds to your taste-buds, new flavor development is a top priority for Bevi!
We start by zooming out, taking stock of all the possible flavors out there. We break down our flavors into categories (think “Citrus” and “Tropical”), and then we identify what categories we need to flesh out and where the latest trends are heading.
From that exercise, we come up with a handful of ideas and ask for feedback from our most important critics: our end users. Recently, this meant gathering around 4,000 survey responses asking you to rank our flavor concepts, so you could guide us in creating flavors you would love.
Based on that feedback, we narrow down our list, and voila, we have a few bold new flavors to pursue.
Second: Choosing flavor partners
We’re picky. We work with only the best-of-the-best partners to develop our flavors. We choose our flavor partners carefully to make sure we’re 1) getting the best possible flavors, and 2) working with companies that align with our commitment to sustainability.
Third: The creation
Aka, where the magic happens. How do we get from a full lemon to that tart lemon taste that bursts through in our classic flavor? Glad you asked. The exact process here can differ from one flavor to the next, so we’ll break it down for three of our most popular options. Drumroll, please…
Lemon: Our signature Lemon flavor comes from lemon essence. Here’s how it works: we start with lemon peels, cold-press the peels to get oil, and then make an extract with those oils. Easy-peasy lemon squeezy (don’t hate us…we had to). In keeping with our commitment to sustainability, no part of the lemon goes to waste: the rest of the fruit is used by our suppliers to make juice concentrate that can be used for many other applications.
Cucumber: We craft our refreshing Cucumber flavor using cucumber essence extracted through maceration, which is simpler than it sounds. Here’s how it works: start with the whole cucumber. Soak the entire vegetable in liquid. Extract the flavor from the liquid. Pretty simple.
Strawberry Lemongrass: Our Strawberry Lemongrass flavor is, predictably, a combination of Strawberry and Lemongrass. To get the Lemongrass flavor, we start with the entire lemongrass plant. From there, we use a distillation process to extract the oil. Here’s how it works: steam goes through the lemongrass, the vapors are collected, and then the vapors are cooled to condense and produce a liquid. The water is drained off, leaving the lemongrass oils behind. The Strawberry flavor, meanwhile, comes from a strawberry essence created through a maceration process—which, as with the cucumber flavor, means that the entire fruit is soaked in liquid, and then the resulting liquid is concentrated.
Fourth: Tasting time
Our flavors have to taste just right, that’s a given. To make sure they do, we test our samples internally and, when possible, take them to a high-usage site to get user feedback, so we can make sure our flavors knock it out of the park every time. Beyond nailing the taste, one of our chief criteria here is whether it is “sessionable”—i.e., will we all want to drink a full bottle of this?
Finally: Refine, perfect, launch
We’re perfectionists (and really, would you have it any other way?). We often go through six or seven rounds of samples to find the right balance. Once we’ve landed on that perfect recipe, it’s finally time to share it with the world. Ta-da.
And that’s it—now you know the mystery behind our magic. This road map gets us from initial inspiration to our delicious assortment of bold flavors. Have you tried them all yet?
Jeff Gapinski
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