The Story Behind Spring Branch Kombucha

Chris Ollis’s success as an entrepreneur certainly had a nontraditional beginning: It started in his basement. “I was brewing beer at home in the basement, and it was fun to make and put into kegs,” Ollis says. “But I mean, that’s a lot of beer, especially for home usage, and I was kind of thinking it wasn’t the best health option for me.” Around that time, he came across a book about how to brew kombucha. It turned out that there were a lot of similarities in equipment. So Ollis brewed his first batch of kombucha, and it turned out that he really liked the product. He says it was fun to make, and he didn’t have to feel guilty about drinking it.

Interested in the health benefits of kombucha, Ollis continued to pursue learning more about how to make it himself, and he started dispensing it out of kegs. However, Ollis says that his wife, Jessica, was still a little dubious about the product at that point. The two bottled some of their new kombucha up, and she took it to her friends to try. “They offered to start buying it from her immediately,” says Ollis. “So that was like, ‘Maybe we’ve got something here that people might be interested in.’ And so we started down the rabbit hole relatively quickly.”

After learning more about Missouri’s laws for commercial soft drink brewing operations, Ollis moved the operation out of the basement, buying and remodeling a building in 2017. A reporter saw the building permits and took interest in covering their product. Soon after, the Ollises got a phone call from Wil Fischer Distributing. “It was crazy because it’s almost unheard of for a small business to be able to work with a distributor of the caliber of Wil Fischer at any stage of their business, much less before they actually have doors on the building,” Ollis says.

They also quickly began receiving interest from distributors like MaMa Jean’s Natural Market. “We got a really great start because there was a pent-up need and really solid interest in southwest Missouri having a non-alcoholic beverage producer, so that’s the genesis for how we got started,” he says. “The plan was: Let’s build this thing, and we’ll experiment a little bit. But we started having interest before we were even done with the building. So we quickly got a plan in place and started developing different flavors.”

All throughout the creation of the business, Ollis continued working full-time as an investment manager for US Bank until 2022. “We’ve always had a purposeful intent for our business,” he says. “It started off as more of a side business initially but the idea was to scale it into something bigger.”

Spring Branch Kombucha products can be purchased online or at a local partner, whether it’s a grocer like Nature’s Wonder, a coffee shop like Echelon Coffee or a brewery like Tie & Timber Beer Co. or 4 by 4 Brewing Company.

These community partnerships helped see them through the more difficult parts of their journey, like navigating the supply problems of COVID-19 and fluctuation in prices and products in the aftermath. “We saw a very large amount of change in a short period of time,” Ollis says. “The number one thing I would say to anyone out there is if you’re coming up against headwinds, there are definitely still ways to pivot.”